useAsTitle function hook

[katywings]

Maybe its a terrible idea for performance 🤔 , but I think it would be very useful if the useAsTitle config could accept a function taking the current document and returning any string as title. That way the developer could implement titles for many use cases.

Related:

• customize admin-appearance of array-element-headers (similar to defaultColumns/useAsTitle) #808
• Looking for suggestion on how to use publishTime as admin title #623

[jmikrut]

Yeah! I don't think this would be too bad for performance actually and we would happily accept a PR to allow for this. It'd be a pretty simple one to do. I'd probably just CMD+F for all instances of useAsTitle and then ensure each one is updated properly to suit the new API. Being that useAsTitle is only relevant in the admin UI, it should have no impact on the API side at all, making this potentially pretty straightforward.

Good call! I like it!

[katywings]

@jmikrut Thank you for your analysis! I thought a bit further about the implications of this. Depending on how we implement this I see two possible tradeoffs that we have to take:

1. Localization support: Do you think its needed for useAsTitle? Then we should write the useAsTitle function call like a react hook, so that useLocale could be called in useAsTitle 🤔
2. Async support: Are there use cases were the custom useAsTitle function would depend on async code? What is the general design concept on other similar functions in Payload?

[zubricks]

The team just reviewed this discussion and came up with a few reason why this will actually be quite a negative performance impact. It will also never be able to support async functions because of its heavy usage in the relationship field component.

A really nice way to do this would be to use a disabled field and a field hook to generate a title on the backend. We actually do this in our own website CMS where we use a hidden fullTitle field that is generated on the backend with hooks.

[katywings]

@zubricks Thank you and the team for the feedback! I saw the approach with the field hook and I think it is very reasonable 👍.

Maybe one possible overall project-strategy in the long term, for similar questions could be a "best practices / faq" section in the docs 🤔? E.g. "How can I show a combination of multiple fields as title?" -> "Set up a disabled field as useAsTitle and use a field hook to generate the title on save"

[VanCoding]

@zubricks I think to work around performance issues this could be split into 2 separate changes:

• Allow passing an array or something to "useAsTitle" that allows fetching multiple fields to use as title
• Allow overriding the "title" component that receives all those values specified in useAsTitle and renders them to a title value

What do you think?

The second change would be useful on its own, for cases where the title value is an object and it should be rendered to a title.