Relation widget that uses a select or radio button interface

[jake-101]

• Do you want to request a feature or report a bug?
  Feature

• What is the current behavior?
  The Relation widget is an autocomplete text box.

• What is the desired behavior?
  Maybe it is possible already, but I think it'd be cool to select a related collection through a select element dropdown or radio buttons, with the ability to add a new item with a text box... something like the chosen.js interface maybe? I want to create blog categories and think this would be the best UI.. Maybe I will try to make my own widget if this isn't possible already...

[kennedyrose]

We were hoping for this too. Our builds break every time one of those fields doesn't match up to an existing collection.

[erquhart]

#1100 was meant to address this, see there for prior art.

[1-800-jono]

This would be great.

Currently the autocomplete text box is great but feels slow due to the fact that it starts to display results after you type more than 3 characters. I understand that this is to help performance but many times you don't need this performance benefit if you don't have that many items.

For example if you have a collection of blog categories it would be nice to display them all instead of guessing and typing until you see a result. It would be better UX to have the option of a select input for a relations widget for such cases.

I'm currently deciding if I should get rid of a categories collection and just hard code the values using a select widget for this reason. But then I lose a bit of the CMSness I was hoping to have.

I've been loving Netlify CMS and the community so don't get me wrong, I appreciate everything about it but just wanted to share my two cents regarding the relation widget :)

[rdebeasi]

I think part of the problem here is that the current widget looks like a normal text box. It's not clear that the box is actually a search field.

Possible fixes:

• Add a search icon to the field to show that this is a search field.
• Use the "scrollable container" option shown on http://react-autosuggest.js.org/. (The relation widget uses this component under the hood.)
• Make the field a dropdown with a search field, similar to chosen.js (as @jake-101 suggested).
• Make the autocomplete faster and more reliable by fixing Relation Widget Makes API call for each instance #1357.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[erquhart]

We need to combine the select and relation widget and just have a select widget with the optional ability to populate values via relation. This is outlined in #391 (comment).

[paulbille]

has this progressed?, or is there a work around?

[mark-stopka]

Any update on this one?

[erezrokah]

The best way to move this forward is to submit a contribution for it.