embedded_list reference fields do not work

I have an edit view with an embedded list field that has sub-fields of reference type and they do not work properly. There is no call to the rest api asking for the list in this example.

        nga.field('editResultsId', 'embedded_list')
            .label('Edit Results')
            .targetFields([
                nga.field('fileSystemId', 'reference')
                    .label('File System')
                    .targetEntity(file)
                    .targetField(nga.field('name'))
                    .validation({ required: true }),

[dowlingw]

I had a quick look at this today but wasn’t able to make much progress - had to figure out how things hang together. Leaving some notes as @etdev was keen to look at this also.

Crud/routing.js creates a bunch of ui-router resolve definitions based on the model coming out of the admin-config library.

It looks like lib/Utils/ReferenceExtractor in admin-config is the culprit, it only looks at the top level object and doesn’t traverse complex fields.

Took a quick stab at fixing this but I’ve run out of time to look at it this week and it doesn’t work. Here’s the code so far, it’s a recursive function to find all the reference fields during a call to getReferences.

let find_references = function(fields, recurse_func) {
    let result = new Array();

    fields.forEach(function(field, idx) {
        if( field.type() === 'reference' || f.type() === 'reference_many' ) {
            result.push(field);
        } else if( field.type() === 'embedded_list' ) {
            result.push( recurse_func( field.fields(), recurse_func ) );
        }
    });

    return result;
};
let references = find_references(fields,find_references);

Cheers 😃

[jbrownD3]

WORKAROUND – While waiting for the pull-request to be completed, I found an easy workaround. Just add the same reference field to your top level object (make it hidden, non-editable, not required). As long as you use the same object in .targetEntity() in both the top level and embedded, you will get a populated list. Below I just used an empty label and non-editable field, but you can use CSS to hide the field row as well.

`
var wtEntity = nga.entity('webapp_templates');
var embeddedFields = [
        nga.field('webapp_template', 'reference')
            .targetEntity(wtEntity)
            .validation({required: true})
            .targetField(nga.field('context_name'))
            .detailLinkRoute('show'),
        ...  //Other embedded fields
];
var parentFields = [
        nga.field('webapps', 'embedded_list')
            .targetFields(embeddedWebappsFields),
    ...  //Other parent fields
        nga.field('webapp_template', 'reference')   //Workaround for reference in embedded list
            .targetEntity(wtEntity)  //Same entity object, not just another entity with the same name
            .editable(false)  //non-editable keeps the control from showing
            .label('')  //no label
            .validation({required: false})  //not required so it won't error
            .targetField(nga.field('context_name')),  //not sure this is needed, but I left it
];

`