Managing Field Sections | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• What are field sections
• How to manage field sections and section dividers
• How to add or remove fields from sections

What are Field Sections?

Field Sections allow you to organize how fields appear in Entity Edit for your end users. You can create new field sections, rearrange the field sections, move fields in and out of field sections, and rearrange fields within a section. The best part - you can do this for both built-in and custom fields!

When you’re looking at an individual entity, you’ll notice that the fields are organized into sections, like “Core Information” or “Business Details”. These are the built-in field sections that we provide for any built-in types. You can then modify these sections or create new ones as you configure an entity type.

This is a feature you should definitely take advantage of if you have users logging into Yext to make updates directly in the platform. If your data is entirely managed via API, it won’t hurt to organize your fields, but it won’t have nearly as much impact on the end experience (and it won’t change anything about your API integrations!).

Note: Does this sound familiar? Previously, we allowed users to organize just Custom Fields using what are now referred to as Custom Field Permission Groups. Moving forward, the Custom Field Permission Groups will only be used for managing access permissions to specific custom fields. Field Sections will control field views moving forward.

How to Manage Field Sections

We recommend that you don’t overthink which section to put your fields in — it’s usually easiest to organize your fields once you’ve fully defined your Entity Types. You can easily move fields between sections or within a section at any time with no impact to things like user permissions or API integrations.

When we think about managing field sections, there are 3 main things you can do:

• Add or modify the sections themselves
• Add, move, or rearrange fields in sections
• Add or modify section dividers

We’ll cover each in detail below.

Managing Sections

You have the ability to add, update, rearrange or delete sections. You can do all of this by navigating to Content > Configuration > Entity Types and clicking in to Edit Fields on a specific type. All section management is specific to an entity type, so modifying a section for one type will not impact any other types. Section names must be less than 255 characters and must be unique within a given entity type (e.g., you can’t have two Sections named “Business Details” on a Location type). Section names and what section a field belongs to has no bearing on any of your consumer-facing experiences - it is meant purely to help make entity management more intuitive for your users.

Adding a New Section

If you want to create new sections, you can click the “+” icon in the left pane or below an existing section and click “Add Section”. You’ll be prompted to type in the name of your section, and you can optionally add any translations for the section name (only applicable if you have users logging in that are using the platform in other languages). Once you add a new section, you’ll then be able to start adding fields to that section by dragging and dropping or clicking “Add Field”. More on that below.

Updating a Section

You can update a section’s name by hovering over the section (either in the left pane or in the center), and clicking the pencil icon. You can then update the section name or add/modify any translations (again, only applicable if you have users logging in to use Entity Edit in additional languages). Remember that updating a section for one type will not impact the same section for other types.

When you modify a section name, make sure that you modify the available translations for that section. For any built-in sections, we’ll have translations available in some languages, but once you modify the name it is important you update the translations if that’s important for your users. You can also add a new translation by clicking “+ Add Translation”.

Deleting a Section

You can delete a section by hovering over the section (either in the left pane or in the center), and clicking the trash can icon. When you delete a section, you need to tell us what you want to do with the fields that are currently in that section. You have 2 options:

1. Delete the section and move all the fields to another section (recommended)
2. Delete the section, delete any optional custom fields, and move any built-in or required fields (if applicable) to another section

We highly recommend choosing the first option, as we cannot retrieve the data for fields that have been deleted.

Once you choose which option you want, you’ll be prompted to select a section to move any applicable fields to. If you want to move the fields to a new section, you must create that section first.

Add a Section from an Existing Entity Type

You can add an entire section from another entity type, including the name and all of the fields. You can do this by clicking on “More Actions > Add Section from Existing Entity Type” in the top right of screen. You can then select an Entity Type and you’ll see the list of sections on that type to select from. Once you select one (or more), you can click “Add Section” and the section and its fields will be added to your type. You can always delete any of the fields you don’t want to include before clicking Save on your Field Configuration.

Rearranging Sections

You can reorder sections at any time by hovering over the section in the left pane and clicking and dragging to your desired order.

Collapsing Sections

You can choose to collapse sections by default to hide the list of fields in a section from displaying on Entity Edit. If you collapse a section, the fields in that section will be hidden until the section is expanded by a user on the Entity Edit page. To collapse a section toggle the “Collapse by default” toggle on.

Managing Fields in Sections

Once you have your sections, you can add, move or rearrange fields within the sections.

Add a Field to a Section

If you want to add a new field to your Entity type and place it in a specific section, you can click on the “+” sign below the Section you want to add it to, find or create the field from the modal, and click “Add Field”.

Move a Field to a different Section

If the field is already on the type, you can either click-and-drag the field into the section you want the field in (either on the left pane or by scrolling on the page), or you can hover over the field and click the “Move to” button and select the new destination Section.

Rearrange Fields within a Section

If you want to rearrange the fields within a section, you can click and drag the row by hovering on the far left of the field row and clicking on the “grabber”. You can rearrange fields in whatever order you’d like.

Managing Section Dividers

You may have noticed that field sections are arranged by dividers. For example, the Location entity type has section dividers called “Content”, “Publisher Specific”, “Other” and “Settings”. You can add, update or remove section dividers just like you can sections. Section dividers are purely for easier navigation when users are in Entity Edit and will not impact any of your consumer-facing experiences.

Add a Section Divider

To add a new divider, you can either hover between 2 sections in the left pane or click the “+” at the bottom of the left pane and select “Add Section Divider”. You can then name the divider and click to drag it into place.

Update or Remove an Existing Section Divider Name or Translation

Similar to sections, you can update or remove an existing divider at any time by hovering over it and clicking on the trash can icon.

“Other Fields” Section

You may notice that some of your fields are in an “Other Fields” section. You can think of this section as a catch-all for your fields that aren’t organized into a section because they were added to your Entity Type outside of the Field Configuration UI (e.g., Custom Fields screen, Config as Code or the API). These will still be visible for your users in this section on Entity Edit (always at the bottom), but you’ll need to organize these fields into sections in order to do things like setting to “Visible on Add” or “Required”.