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Modification to published magnolia components

Let suppose that in Magnolia's Page application you have few pages with instances of component "A" which have property dialog. These pages are published to Public server.

  • later you decide to change structure of this properties (add fields or for example change image field to array of images)
  • to do so you would modify component's dialog yaml file (add/modify fields) and component's template ftl file to render these changes

Question: - will this destroy previously created pages with instances of component "A"? i.e. if you need to modify component's properties it's better to create new component instead of modify existing?

Solution

  • It's fine to modify existing component, as long as you take care of the fact that existing instances will not have any values for newly added properties/fields. So in template you need to expect that you might get empty values and provide good defaults to cover that case. So technically, you can modify the component just fine.

    Whether it is better to create new component or modify existing one depends more on the business needs. Is it desired pages to see new component look & get new fields in pages that already use the component or are those changes relevant just for new pages in which component will be used?

    Another consideration is the more components you have, the harder it would be for editor to pick the right one from the ever growing list. However the more functionality you cram into single component, the more complex and difficult to test it would become and harder it would be to replace it with something else in the future.