Trying to get relation widget to work with file in nested collection

Netlify CMS
1

Hi all,

I’m struggling to get the relation widget to work for a list of authors that’s kept in a YAML file in a “Settings” collection, similar to the setup here: netlify-cms/config.yml at master · netlify/netlify-cms · GitHub

I’ll post what I have, it looks very similar to the config.yml above since that’s how I’ve been doing dev & test locally:

collections:
  - name: 'faq' 
    label: 'FAQ'
    folder: '_faqs'
    create: true 
    fields: 
      - { label: 'Question', name: 'title', widget: 'string', tagname: 'h1' }
      - { label: 'Answer', name: 'body', widget: 'markdown' }
      - {
          label: "Author",
          name: "author",
          widget: "relation",
          collection: "settings",
          searchFields: ["authors.authors.name"],
          displayFields: ["authors.authors.name"],
          valueField: "authors.authors.name",
          required: false
        }

  - name: 'settings'
    label: 'Settings'
    delete: false # Prevent users from deleting documents in this collection
    editor:
      preview: false
    files:
      - name: 'general'
        label: 'Site Settings'
        file: '_data/settings.json'
        description: 'General Site Settings'
        fields:
          - { label: 'Global title', name: 'site_title', widget: 'string' }
          - label: 'Post Settings'
            name: posts
            widget: 'object'
            fields:
              - {
                  label: 'Number of posts on frontpage',
                  name: front_limit,
                  widget: number,
                  min: 1,
                  max: 10,
                }
              - { label: 'Default Author', name: author, widget: string }
              - { label: 'Default Thumbnail', name: thumb, widget: image, class: 'thumb', required: false }

      - name: 'authors'
        label: 'Authors'
        file: '_data/authors.yml'
        description: 'Author descriptions'
        fields:
          - name: authors
            label: Authors
            label_singular: 'Author'
            widget: list
            fields:
              - { label: 'Name', name: 'name', widget: 'string', hint: 'First and Last' }
              - { label: 'Description', name: 'description', widget: 'markdown' }

My goal is to have each FAQ entry be able to specify an author in the editor UI by selecting one via dropdown. However, I cannot get the dropdown to display a list of authors correctly. I’ve gotten the dropdown to display two blank selections (with two authors in the YAML file)…

Another resource I looked at is Description of the collection with nested fields · GitHub, which makes me believe that trying to access a nested collection should work.

Any ideas what I’m doing wrong? Or maybe this isn’t possible?

Thanks in advance.

2

For now you’ll need to use have your authors in individual files within a folder collection, the relation widget doesn’t currently work against file based collections: Relation doesn't work for collections defined within a file-based collection · Issue #800 · netlify/netlify-cms · GitHub

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