The Read-Only Fields Tridion GUI Extension

A much requested feature we at Tridion have always heard customers asking for is to be able to make component fields disabled for the end user when they are entering content.

This could be due to several reasons, one example could be that the content shouldn’t be manually typed into the field but rather be chosen from a 3rd party source (like a CRM database), for this a custom URL can be used.
A custom URL window is a neat feature in Tridion allowing the developers of the solution to build an external form/app/html page that will help the editors enter the right information into a field.

You can also think of a scenario where fields will become disabled or enabled based on the content being entered into other fields, giving the component edit form a more wizard-like feel.

The extension I created doesn’t have any such specific business logic but it does give a good basis to achieve it if needed.

The extension itself covers all types of fields; text, rich text, numeric, date, links and embedded.

Using jQuery for Tridion GUI Extensions

A relatively unknown feature of the Tridion CMS product is the GUI extensibility framework.

This is actually a fantastic feature which allows us to create and supplement the user interface with just about any type of addition we can think of.

It is pretty unknown because of the lack of documentation but with a little bit of investigation work it is possible to find all sorts of treasures we can use to extend the current GUI.

Here’s one example that is already available on the SDLTridionWorld website’s Community eXtensions section: “Republish from publish queue”, this nifty extension gives users the ability to republish items directly from the queue instead of the normal way of locating the item within the folder or structuregroup hierarchy.

The extension framework is quite robust (not without limitations of course) and allows us to add toolbar items, context menu options, tree nodes or simply run scripts that can do just about anything.

In this article I’m focusing on the latter, adding a scripted extension to do different tasks.

If you’ve done any kind of javascript development you know how difficult and complex it can get, that’s where jQuery comes in, jQuery being a javascript library created to ease the development of client side code.

jQuery’s CSS selectors and methods for DOM manipulation are exactly the tools to help us create Tridion GUI extensions quickly and with relative ease.

The way the extension framework is built allows us to create a jQuery extension that can be reused by other extensions.