When you're modeling content, you may want specific fields to be populated in an entry, before an author can publish or move the entry into the next stage of its workflow. Here we are in a blog post entry. The title field already is marked as required. Every entry in Contensis has to have a title, so the validation for this field has automatically been set.

If we wanted this summary field to be marked as required, we need to open up the Content Type Builder to make that change. We can do that by going to the Content Modelling menu and selecting Content Types. Or a quick shortcut is to click on the triple dot and to click on Edit Content Type. Now, with the Content Type open for editing we can find our Summary field, which is here.

Once we've selected the field, we open up the properties for that field. So we're in the settings panel at the moment. If we go to the validation panel, we'll see that there's a required field validation and by turning on this validation, we'll mark that field as required. Let's save and publish the change.

And let's go and take a look at that blog post again with that field validation now set. So let's go to the entries listing screen and let's take a look at this blog post. And we can see in this summary, the field is now marked as required. If I remove that content, so let's just cut it for the moment, and I hit save, I can save the entry because we don't want to prevent authors from kind of working on an entry before published.

But if I attempt to send this entry for approval now... We can see that this field is marked as required and we're getting a validation error. It shows in our validation summary and we get this error message displayed. So that's great. We've set the field as required, but we can further set a little bit more detail.

So we got this field is required, but you might want to give more of a descriptive error message for your authors. So to enhance this, we can go back and edit the content type. We can click back on the summary field. Go back to validation, and you can see here that there's a validation message text box, and it's here that we can create our own custom message.

We can say, the summary is used in social shares and in our search listings,

So save and publish that change. We'll go back and view that entry again. And if I attempt to send this for approval now, we can see the summary is used in social share and in our search listings. So that's how you set a field as required and apply a custom error message for your authors in Contensis.

Make a field required

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How to set the validation

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