Sometimes you want to restrict how long a piece of content should be. For example, you might want to keep your page titles short and succinct, or ensure that the length of your page descriptions meet SEO best practices. We can do this with character count validation, and this can be applied on any text field within Contensis.

Let's take this kicker field for example. The content guidelines state short byline or subtitle. So, how can we limit this to, say, 160 characters? Well, we do it in the Content Type Builder. We can access the Content Type Builder either from selecting Content Modeling in the menu bar and selecting Content Types.

Alternatively, we can click on the triple dot and click on Edit Content Type. With the Content Type Builder now open, I'll select the Kicker field and we'll go to the Validation panel. And as we look down the validation panel, we can see a number of characters validation. So what type of count do we want to set?

Well, we talked about limiting the kicker field to 160 characters. So I'm going to choose the maximum of 160 characters. So when I click on save and publish now, when we go to the entry we were just looking at and click in the field, We're now given a maximum of 160 characters helper text, and it's saying we're currently four characters over.

So as an author, I need to amend this content before I can send it for approval. If I attempt to send it for approval now, you can see I get a validation error. It's exceeding the maximum of 160 characters, so I'll need to make a change to this and say view, and now I can save it, and send it for approval. So that's setting a character count validation on a content type.

Set a character count on a field

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