Multi-reference Field

A Multi-Reference field (which is short for multi-item reference field) does just that. Instead of a Reference field, which lets us pick one item from another collection, a Multi-Reference lets us pick multiple items.

So we have our blog posts. And we have our author at the top of each post. Now Helen is known throughout the industry for hogging the limelight. However, in a new initiative, we decided to credit other contributors to our blog posts.

So we have a little spot on the bottom for contributors. This is all static content right now — it's just the design. Nothing's been added yet from our collection.

Let's go into the CMS, into our Blog Posts collection, and, of course, Settings. All we have to do? Is click multi-reference. We can name the field Contributors, we can add some clarifying help text so anyone else using the CMS or the Editor knows what to do, but the important part here is that we point our multi-reference field to our Authors collection. Here's why:

If we save, and then go into our any of our items, like this blog post (by Helen), we can now see our multi-reference field. And all we have to do? Is choose from the list — the other authors who contributed to this post. Once we've done that, let's save.

Now we've only done this on one post so far, we can go back and fill the rest in later. So we're going to build this using the blog post we just configured.

Let's drag in a collection list so we can list the contributors. And from the Collection dropdown, we can see our brand-new field right there.

Notice how the authors already show up in the list. And from here, this is just like a normal collection list. Let's go over to our Elements panel and grab a heading. We can drag it right into any item, and of course, we'll get the text from our collection.

Our authors are showing up just fine. Warp speed. Actually we're just changing the velocity of the footage we captured so you don't have to watch us tweak every detail.

Alright Dale, let's take it down to normal. Dale. Dale! Okay, we're fast-forwarding through the entire— can we? Thank you, Dale.

So we just finished setting up our contributors in this collection list. And if we go back into the CMS? And we add contributors to another item in our collection? Another blog post? We have our multi-reference field from which we can select our contributors. We can add as many as we'd like.

And once we're done, let's save. And then go back to our collection page. And from the item dropdown, let's pick that blog post we just configured. And at the bottom? We have all our contributors showing up in the collection list.

And that's it! Multi-reference fields give us access to multiple items in another collection.