An advanced custom field is created by completing these steps:
- Create your icon.
- Implement your field.
- Create the editor to configure your field.
- Create the partial view to render your field.
Unlike when creating a simple custom field there's no need to register your advanced custom field anywhere. Simply copy your DLL and the rest of your field assets to your site, and Form Editor will automatically detect your field when the site restarts.
A complete implementation of a custom slider field (input type="range") can be found under Samples. The sample is meant to serve as documentation on its own, so the details of the implementation will not be discussed here. A few things are worth digging into, though.
The field assets (icon, editor and view) are included in the sample project. The directory structure in which they are placed mirrors the structure of your site (at least if you're using the sample templates). In other words you can copy the App_Plugins and Views folders directly to your site, and the assets will be placed correctly:
- The icon and editor goes into /App_Plugins/FormEditor/editor/fields/.
- The partial view(s) goes into the folder where your form template looks for field partials. See the rendering section for details.
The sample project references the Form Editor Binaries NuGet package, which has a dependency on the Umbraco Cms Core Binaries NuGet package. That's why a bunch of Umbraco DLLs are found in the project output bin folder. Don't copy all of these to your site, or it will most likely explode. Please copy only the project output DLL (My.Range.dll).
If your custom field doesn't show up in the Form Editor after adding the field assets to your site, maybe you forgot to add it to a field type group? Read more about field type groups here.
The partial views in the sample project are almost identical with the ones in the simple custom field sample, with the exception of using the configured field properties rather than hard-coded values for min, max and step in the input field.
See the simple custom field section for more details
A field is only allowed one entry in the storage index. But your custom field might actually consist of several fields that the end users can fill out, or it might need to store multiple values for some other reason. If this is the case you'll have to concatenate your values into one field value for the index, and override the appropriate FormatValueFor... methods for display purposes.
Have a look at the UploadField or the MemberInfoField for inspiration.
In case the value stored by your field is not an email address, but you need your field to work as a source for receipt email addresses, you can implement the interface IEmailField to translate your field value into the appropriate email addresses.
Have a look at the MemberInfoField for an example.
You can easily include the submitted values for your field in the built-in statistics. All you need to do is implement an interface and Form Editor will do the rest.
Please note: The statistics interfaces will most likely change over time, which might cause breaking changes for you when you upgrade Form Editor.
At the time of writing, the only type of statistics that's supported is field value frequency statistics. The typical fields for this type of statistics are fields with predefined value ranges. To support field value frequency statistics, your field must implement IValueFrequencyStatisticsField.