Card grid with components

#Overview

This guide shows how to build a card grid using nested components.

This card grid contains a number field so you can indicate how many columns the grid should have, a modular component that lets you select card types for your grid, and a dropdown menu to select the size of the gap between cards.

It is a good option when you have different card types but don't want your content entries to become very large and hard to manage. By adding all your card types to a modular component, you offer Editors the possibility to dynamically select which card type they need.

Card grid with components

#Prerequisites

• You need to have a Hygraph account. If you don't have one, you can sign up here.
• You need to have a Hygraph project. You can:
  • Create a project: This is the way to go if you want to follow the entire tutorial for learning purposes.
  • Clone the cookbook project: This is the way to go if you're curious about how the card grids are made but don't want to follow the step-by-step creation process. This project contains the entire Card Grid Cookbook so you can compare them, or look into what instances they contain.
  • Use an existing project of yours: If you have a project already and want to add this card grid to it, this is the way to go. In this case, you may need to adjust parts of the tutorial to your own project schema.

#Core concepts

In this guide, you'll work with enumerations, components, basic component fields, modular component fields, and nested components. Let's look into these concepts:

• Enumerations: an enumeration is a predefined set of values that represents a list of possible options. You can use them to group values within a type.

• Component: a predefined set of fields that can be reused across models and content entries. You can think of a component as a flexible, reusable template: you define the fields that will be used inside a component once, and then fill them with different content every time you use it in a content entry.

• Basic component field: a component is a special field type in your Hygraph schema that defines which components of which type can be used in a model. Component fields can be of basic or modular types. A basic component field can only have one component attached to it. You can limit the number of component instances to one, or allow multiple component instances to be added in the content entry.

• Modular component field: a modular component field can have two or more components attached to it.

• Nested components: functionality that allows you to create components within a component, as if you had a parent component containing one or more child components.

#What you can do

This guide offers two paths:

• Path 1: Use this guide to create a card grid component that you can reuse across different models in your Hygraph projects.
• Path 2: Clone the project that contains the entire Card Grid cookbook to compare the different card grid configurations without having to clone multiple projects.

#Clone project

We have prepared a project that contains the entire Card Grid cookbook:

Clone this project

This cookbook contains all the recipes we have so far to create card grids, so you can compare the different card grid configurations without having to clone multiple projects.

To find this particular recipe in the cookbook project, navigate to the schema and look for "Card Grid - Components".

This project also contains a demo model that includes all the card grid components in the cookbook as basic component fields, as well as a modular component field that you can use as a card grid type selector.

#Step-by-step guide

Before we can build components, we sometimes need to create other schema elements that will later be added to those components as instances.

We will divide this process in steps to make it more manageable:

1. Create enumerations: We will need to create three different enumerations to provide styling options.
2. Create a component for links: We will create a simple link component for one of the card types we will work on afterward.
3. Create a component for buttons: We will create a simple button component for one of the card types we will work on afterward.
4. Create the card type components: We will create two components with slightly different card designs. The aim is to have the possibility to select a card type for our grid later on.
5. Create the card grid: Finally, we'll combine all the elements we worked on before to generate a dynamic card grid with a modular component that allows card type selection.

#1. Create the enumerations

We will start by creating the enumerations that we can later add to our components as dropdown menus that will let us select different style options for our cards and card grid.

We'll start with the "Theme" enumeration. We'll navigate to our project schema and click +Add next to Enumerations.

We'll use the following information:

Theme enumeration

Next, we need to add enumeration values. These are the options we will get when using this later as a dropdown menu.

For the sake of this example, we will use simple styling options: dark & light. Later on, we will add this enumeration to our buttons and cards.

For every enumeration value, we need to enter a Display name, an API ID, and click Add.

We'll add the following values:

Theme enumeration values

We'll click Add enumeration to save.

Now that our theme enumeration has been created, we'll create another one for padding, so we can later use a dropdown to decide what type of padding our cards will have.

We'll use the following information to create the enumeration:

Next, we need to add the following enumeration values in the same way we added values to the previous enumeration:

Padding enumeration values

We'll click Add enumeration to save.

We'll create one final enumeration that we will later use to select the type of gap between our cards on the grid. We'll use the following information:

Next, we need to add the following enumeration values:

Cards gap enumeration values

Finally, we'll click Add enumeration to save.

#2. Create the link component

It is time to create our first component. Our cards will need to have a link, and in this case we'll create a simple component for that.

We'll click +Add next to Components and we'll use the following information to create one:

Link component

Click Add component to save.

We can now start adding instances to this component.

Let's start with a Single line text field, which will be the label of our link. We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

Link component - Label

We'll click Add to save.

Finally, let's add a Slug field, which will be our link URL. We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

Link component - URL

We'll click Add to save.

This is how you build a simple link component in Hygraph. You can add this component to different models in your schema. We will add this to our cards later on.

Link component

#3. Create the button component

One of the cards we will create later will use a button component. Let's create it!

We'll use the following information to create the component itself:

Link component

We'll click Add component to save.

We can now start adding instances to this component.

Let's start with a Single line text field, which will be the label of our button. We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

Link component - Label

We'll click Add to save.

Let's also add a Slug field, which will be our link URL. We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

Link component - URL

We'll click Add to save.

Finally, we'll add an Enumeration field for the button themes, which will be one of our dropdown menus. We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

Link component - Theme

We'll click Add to save.

Our button component should look like this:

Link component - Theme

#4. Create the card type components

We need to create cards so we can add them to our card grid. In this example, we will create two card types showing two typical card schema element combinations. Each card type is a component, which we will later on add to our grid.

To create the first card type, we'll click +Add next to Components and use the following information:

Card Type 1 component

We'll click Add component to save.

We can now start adding instances to this component.

Let's start with a Single line text field, which will be the title of our card. We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

Card Type 1 component - Title

We'll click Add to save.

Next, we'll add a Rich text field, which will be the body of our card. We'll select the Rich text field from the right sidebar and use the following information to create it:

Card Type 1 component - Body

We'll click Add to save.

The next thing we want to add here is the link component we created earlier, so our card can contain a link.

We'll select the Basic component field from the right sidebar and use the following information to create it:

Card Type 1 component - Nested Link component

We'll click Add to save.

Next, we'll add an Enumeration field, which will be one of our dropdown menus. Once again, we'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

Card Type 1 component - Theme enumeration

We'll click Add to save.

Finally, we'll add one more Enumeration field, for the padding options:

Card Type 1 component - Padding enumeration

We'll click Add to save.

Our "Card type 1" component should look like this:

Card Type 1 component

We now have our first card type ready! It contains a title, a body, a link component, and two enumerations that will let us select theme and padding options.

Let's now create our second card type component. We'll start by clicking +Add next to Components and repeating the process using this information:

Card Type 2 component

We'll click Add component to save.

We can now start adding instances to this component.

Let's start with a Single line text field, which will be the title of our card. We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

Card Type 2 component - Title

We'll click Add to save.

Next, we'll add a Rich text field, which will be the body of our card. We'll select the Rich text field from the right sidebar and use the following information to create it:

Card Type 2 component - Body

We'll click Add to save.

Next, we'll add an Asset picker field, so we can later add an image to our card. We'll select the Asset picker field from the right sidebar and use the following information to create it:

Card Type 2 component - Image

We'll click Add to save.

The next thing we want to add here is the button component we created earlier. We'll select the Basic component field from the right sidebar and use the following information to create it:

Card Type 2 component - Nested button component

We'll click Add to save.

Next, we'll add an Enumeration field, which will be one of our dropdown menus. Once again, we'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

Card Type 2 component - Theme enumeration

We'll click Add to save.

Finally, we'll add one more Enumeration field, for the padding options:

Card Type 2 component - Padding enumeration

We'll click Add to save.

Our "Card Type 2" component should look like this:

Card Type 2 component

We now have our second card type ready! It contains a title, a body, a button component, an asset picker to add images, and two enumerations that will let us select theme and padding options.

#5. Create the card grid

At this point, we've created everything we need in order to start working on our card grid component. We'll create a new component using this information:

Card grid component

We'll click Add component to save.

We can now start adding instances to this component.

Let's start with a Number field, which we can later use to indicate the number of columns that our grid should have.

We'll find it on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

Card grid component - Number of columns

We'll click Add to save.

Earlier, we created two card types. We will now add them as part of a Modular component field so when we use the card grid component, we will be able to select which card type to use in it.

We'll find the Modular component field on the Add fields right sidebar, click on it, and use the following information:

Card grid component - Card type selector

We'll click Add to save.

The final step will be to add an Enumeration field so we can later select the gap size between cards. We'll use the following information to create it:

Card grid component - Gap size

We'll click Add to save.

We've created a card grid component that contains several other components nested in it at different levels, as well as other schema elements.

Card grid with components

This guide helped you create the schema element yourself. Alternatively, you can clone a project containing all our card grid recipes.

Check out the next document section for that!

#Useful links

• Enumerations
• Components documentation