Customize Field Sections and Entity Previews | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• What Customizable Entity Previews are
• How to manage Entity Previews
• Best Practices for Entity Previews

Overview

Customizable Entity Previews allow you to adjust what fields display for each entity when viewing a list of entities. This allows you to display the most important information about your entities directly to field users, so they can navigate and manage their entities much more efficiently.

For example, this can take you from a default entity preview for a menu item:

To a custom entity preview like this:

Entity previews can be configured for each entity type (for both built-in and custom entity types) — so you can highlight what is most important on an entity type by entity type basis. You can also customize your entity previews for Row view and Card view in your entity search results.

How to Manage Entity Previews

When thinking about managing entity previews there are two main components:

• Selecting the fields you would like to display in the preview
• Adjusting the display settings for each field

Entity Previews can be found in the Entity Type Configuration page. To navigate there:

1. Click Content in the navigation bar, then click Configuration.
2. Click View Details next to the entity type you’d like to customize a preview for.
3. Click on the Preview tab.

One you’re on the Preview tab you will see the current entity preview for that entity type. The default previews will start you out with fields that vary by entity type, but they can all be removed from the entity preview if desired.

Selecting Fields

In the left sidebar you can select and deselect fields to add or remove them from the entity preview.

The list of fields in the sidebar includes all fields that are associated with the relevant entity type. The organization of fields in that list is based on the configuration of the fields and field sections for that entity type.

Once you add the desired fields you can drag and drop the fields in the preview so they appear in your preferred order.

You can also customize how your preview appears in Row view and Card view entity search results. Choose the view you’d like to customize under Select View.

Important Notes

• Changes are not saved when switching between Row view and Card view. Remember to save any changes by clicking Save in the lower right.
• You can add up to 7 fields to your entity preview. You will not be able to save your entity preview if you have selected too many fields.
  • Subfields of struct-like fields are treated as separate fields within entity previews and each subfield counts as one of the 7 total fields that can be added. The only exceptions are Address, Hours, and Daily Times type subfields, which will be rendered together as one field.
• You can only include one photo or video field in a preview.
• Photo and video fields will always be left-aligned and cannot be repositioned.
• You can only emphasize one field in a preview.

Emphasizing Fields

When customizing your entity preview you have the ability to emphasize a field which will create a title for the preview. This functionality can be used to easily identify different entities.

By default, the name field will be toggled on as the emphasized fields. We recommend emphasizing the name, or any field that will help your account’s users identify the entity that they are looking at.

You can only have one emphasized field per preview.

Emphasizing a field will remove the Field Name from displaying for that field. You will learn more about field display settings in the next section.

Adjust Display Settings

In addition to emphasizing a field value, there are a variety of settings that you can configure for each field.

For example:

• You can choose to hide or show the field name.
• If you decide to show the field name, you can enter an alias for that field name.
• You can adjust the line height of a field.

Once you make your desired adjustments to each field, you click Apply. This will adjust the preview to reflect the changes you made to that field.

Show Field Name and Use Field Name Alias

As you can see in the image below the ‘Address’ field has been configured to not display the field name, and the ‘Description’ field is displaying the field name.

When you choose to display the field name, you also have the option to enter a field name alias. This can be used to help clarify or label the details of the field when it appears in entity search.

If you decide to enter a Field Name Alias for a field, you can also add translations to the Field Alias, by clicking on the + Add Translation link.

Adjust the line height

You can adjust the line height for each field in the entity preview to most effectively display the content of that field.

As you can see in the example below, the text in the ‘Side Options’ field is cut off.

This is an example of when you would adjust the line height of a field so all of the content saved in that field is visible in the entity preview.

Adjusting Photo Fields

Photo fields have slightly different settings based on the nature of the field type.

For all photo and video fields, you will be able to select the ratio of their image to ‘Fill’ which will crop the image to fill the allotted space, or ‘Fit’ which will not crop the photo and therefore may not take up all of the allowed space. By default this is set to “Fill” which we recommend to optimize the preview.

List Fields

List fields also have a couple additional options. For example, you can choose to ‘Show List Value’ or ‘Show List Count’.

Showing the list value will show you the list of values that are included in that list. For example, for menu item entities types this may list all of the allergens associated with an item.

The list count will display the count of the total number of options that are stored in the list for the entity, and the list value will display the details of each option.

In the example above, the list count is displayed as a (70), and the list values are displayed as Item 1, Item 2, etc.

Saving Entity Previews

As you make adjustments to each field in the entity preview, you will click Apply to save the change. That will update the preview on the Configuration screen, so you can view the updates you’re making.

Once you click Save in the bottom right corner of the page, the Entity Preview configuration will be applied to that entity type and will begin to display accordingly in the entity search page in Content.

Note that changes are not saved as you switch between Row view and Card view. Remember to click Save in the lower right before switching between views.

Best Practices

Select the most relevant fields!

• Choose fields for your preview that will highlight important information about entities of a given type to your field users
• Emphasize a field in your preview that can help your account’s users identify the entities they are looking at.
  • For example, if many entities share the same Name, it might make sense to choose a different field to emphasize within your previews.

Using Field Name Aliases

• Use Field Name Aliases when your field names are too long for your preview, or if you are adding a sub-field of a main field to your preview.
• For example, in the example below, the Menu URL has 3 sub-fields associated with it. If you wanted to add the Menu URL > Display URL field to the entity preview, in the entity preview you can only see ‘Menu URL > …’. Adding an alias for this field name will help you more easily identify the details of that field when you are on the entity search page in Content.