RFC: Enable inheritance for NodeType properties

Creating Neos & Flow
1

Mixins are great!
But the names of mixin-properties can’t change and they can collide soon if you work with a lot of mixins and / or if you work a long time at the same project.

Proposal: Inheritance syntax for properties in yaml.

Example:

Vendor.Project:BasicPropertiesMixin:
  abstract: true
  properties:
    singleline-inspector:
      # basic property configuration
    text-inplace:
      # basic property configuration

Vendor.Project:Person:
  superTypes:
    'Vendor.Project:BasicProperties': true
  properties:
    'firstname < singleline-inspector': []
    'lastnamename < singleline-inspector': []
    'description < text-inplace':
      # override the basic property configuration
      ui:
        aloha:
          placeholder: 'About this Person'

To get this functionality we need at least the following changes:


Would be great to get this or a better solution in to the core.

2 Likes
2

In the currently proposed solution, the finally not needed properties singleline-inspector and text-inplace have to be removed with a postprocessor in this example.

But I would not clean up these properties automatically because the example could also look like the following:

Vendor.Project:PersonPropertiesMixin:
  abstract: true
  properties:
    firstname:
      # ...
      ui:
        label: 'First name'
    description:
      # ...
      ui:
        aloha:
          placeholder: 'About this Person'

Vendor.Project:Person:
  superTypes:
    'Vendor.Project:PersonPropertiesMixin': true
  properties:
    # add missing properties, based on already defined ones:
    'middlename < firstname':
      ui:
        label: 'Middle name'
    'lastname < firstname':
      ui:
        label: 'Last name'
3

Hey Stefan,

thanks for your ideas and participation to the project!

I personally think this change would be quite dangerous and hard-to-grasp for people, which is why I would not like to support this. Did you know you can use YAML Anchors to share common configuration parts, as explained in https://gist.github.com/bowsersenior/979804 ?

The drawback is that this would only work in the same file; but that’s probably OK!

All the best,
Sebastian

4

Hi Sebastian,

That’s the main problem, to deliver project-wide property defaults this won’t work.

True. It’s an additional dimension to think about while creating NodeTypes.
But if it’s used right, it allows slimmer and non-breaking NodeType-Properties.

Maybe it’s a way to refactor the NodeTypeManager and YamlSource with Interfaces, so that they can get replaced by design?

1 Like
5

Hey Stefan,

I’d be fine with the direction of adding the necessary hooks / interfaces for NodeTypeManager or Configuration Framework in order to hook into this in an extra package :slight_smile:

If you need help figuring out the exact places, let me know :heart:

All the best,
Sebastian

2 Likes
6

There’s already the NodeTypePostprocessorInterface that allows you to enrich all kinds of node type configurations. Does that work for you?

7

No this did not worked out, that was my first try: not properly working (!) solution for neos nodetype property inheritance · GitHub
This way there was a problem with i18n fields of inherited properties and it was not possible to inject changes to basic mixins at a later state.

8

so… here is my result:
Flow PR: FEATURE: NodeType Configuration enhancements by sbruggmann · Pull Request #750 · neos/flow-development-collection · GitHub
(Neos PR: FEATURE: NodeType configuration enhancements by sbruggmann · Pull Request #1292 · neos/neos-development-collection · GitHub)

And an implementation example which finally allows the property inheritance:

Let me know what you all think about this :slight_smile: