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Apostrophe 2.90.0: dynamic API-driven choices for "select" and "checkbox" fields, in-context fields for widgets, and more

Official Announcements
#1
  • New feature: select schema fields now support dynamic choices. To use this feature, set choices to the name of a method of your module. Apostrophe will invoke that method on the fly to get the choices. Your method receives (req) and must return an array of choices. Your method can be an async function, or return a promise for the choices array. This means you can contact external APIs to obtain the choices. The choices array is in the same format as ever (objects with label and value properties). Note that if you just want to choose Apostrophe objects of various types, there is a better way: use joinByOne or joinByArray fields. Fields with dynamic choices do not support the showFields option.
  • New feature: checkboxes schema fields also support dynamic choices. The syntax is exactly the same as above. This allows multiple selection.
  • New feature: any select or checkboxes field in the schema of a widget can be moved to a compact select element that appears “in context” on the page, among the widget’s controls. To do that, just set widgetControls: true in the schema field definition. If you wish, you can also set contextual: true so that the field no longer appears in the schema’s editing dialog box. By default the field appears in both places. For space reasons, the interface for checkboxes is also powered by a select element, but you can add multiple choices by selecting the dropdown more than once. Each time you make a change via one of these fields, the widget is refreshed to show the impact of the change. You may use dynamic choices as described above.
  • New feature: the viewsFolderFallback option to apostrophe-templates may now be an array. Thanks to Amin Shazrin.
  • New feature: help has been added to the video widget explaining that what is needed is a URL to a YouTube or other oEmbed-friendly video.
  • New feature: you may now specify htmlHelp as a schema field option if you want to include simple markup, like links. The existing help option expects plaintext and escapes accordingly.
  • New feature: the req objects returned by apos.tasks.getReq and apos.tasks.getAnonReq now include a session object for broader compatibility with methods that expect a proper req. It is a plain object and does not remember anything beyond the lifetime of the req.
  • Bug fix: copying the “Home” page works properly.
  • Bug fix: the Apostrophe migrations progress meter no longer crashes if the operation reports more steps than the expected total.
  • Bug fix: watch all inlined stylesheets for changes, not just those implicitly inlined due to the use of the css extension when pushing them.
  • Bug fix: improved clearing of tooltips. Addresses various situations where a tooltip could linger on the screen.
  • Developer warnings: warning at startup if your module tries to use “extends” rather than “extend” to extend another module.
  • Developer warnings: warning at startup if your module attempts to “extend” apostrophe-assets or one of a few other core modules that are normally singletons, and probably should not ever have a competing instance under another name. Advice is given to write project level code for the module without extend, or to use improve when enhancing it via an npm module.

Many thanks to Michelin for making this work possible via Apostrophe Enterprise Support.