Symphony.

If you enable a select box field to ‘allow multiple options’ you can’t make it a required field. Why? I want my users to select an option. But I don’t mind if they select more than one option.

Can somebody explain why this is the case?

Looks like you can’t make this field required anyway (i.e. with or without the ‘allow multiple’ option). I am not sure why it doesn’t have this option.

(The Select Box Link Field has the ‘required’ option, and implementation doesn’t look difficult.)

Related to #287 Optional Select Box Link does not show “Optional” label.

No, the standard Select Box field doesn’t have the “make this a required field” option at all!

I can understand why you don’t need to make a standard select box required, because a select box, by its very nature, always has something selected. But when you allow multiple items it is possible to have the field return no value.

@michael-e Thanks for the tip about Select Box Link Field.

@charrison1988: You should be aware of the big difference between the two fields. While the standard Select Box field writes values as strings to the database, the Select Box Link field works with IDs. Both fields can be useful, depending on your use case.

• The Select Box field will have “permanent string values”, so intended relations to other data sets may be broken by a simple renaming. This may be desired if your (string) value must remain the same no matter what you do to (or in) other sections.
• The Select Box Link field establishes a permanent (true) relation between datasets. This relation survives (and reflects) any renaming etc.

This is something that has been addressed in a newer release :)

Of the SBL extension or Symphony?

New Symphony with the Select Box field, infact, most of the fields have had some work to make them a bit more flexible and usable :)