Best way to append user input to an ongoing list as a file collection?

Netlify CMS
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#1

Hi All,
I have been looking over all the documentation for NetlifyCMS Widgets and I am a bit confused if what I want to do is possible or if I am just overlooking something.

I would like to have a file collection that allows a user to add a string from a string widget to a list widget and be able to save that data as frontmatter.
The contents of that list widget would be saved as a single file (collection)
I see a couple of examples in the KitchenSink but nothing that simply takes the contents of a simple string field (string widget) and adds it to an array of strings (list widget) and when the page is published the strings are appended to the existing list in the file collection.
Is this possible?

#2

I went and asked my question on gitter. No need to answer here since it seems questions like these here are against community standards.

#3

Hi @Devz3n! This place is meant for asking all Netlify related questions, that includes the CMS. There’s a lot of options and possible configurations for Netlify CMS, so it can indeed get a bit overwhelming. I’ll start with the most simple part: configuring an array of strings. That’s possible using the list widgets’ field property:

- label: "Authors"
  name: "authors"
  widget: "list"
  field: {label: Author, name: author, widget: string}

This outputs the following frontmatter:

authors:
  - John
  - James
  - Jim

You can’t, however, safe the contents of a list widget to separate files from a file collection. That’s what folder collections are for: https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/collection-types/#folder-collections. You could maybe write a pre-build script to iterate over the lists content and it to separate files, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you how to do that as I simply never tried it.