#Overview

The RichText field type is an advanced String field that returns your content in 4 different formats by default: raw, HTML, markdown, and text. JSON is also available when embeds are enabled.

The Rich Text field renders an advanced textarea with tools to add headings, links, tables, images, lists, etc.

When a Rich Text field is added to your model, it will automatically generate the following types:

type RichText {
  raw: RichTextAST!
  html: String!
  markdown: String!
  text: String!
  json: RichTextAST!
}

#Rich Text data

Let's talk about Rich Text data in more detail.

• Raw: raw AST (Slate Nodes) offers complete control over how nodes are presented to the user.

• JSON: JSON representations of RTE allows as much control as raw does, but offers the possibility of creating embeds.

  RichText will include the field JSON in addition to raw only if Rich Text Embeds are enabled. Both JSON and raw are aliases, but if you have embeds enabled you should ideally use JSON.

• HTML: HTML can be used with a Rich Text renderer for customization purposes. While rendering the HTML of your rich text is simple, it doesn't offer great customization.

• Markdown: Markdown - like HTML - can be used for customization. While markdown is easier to read and write - specially for users without a technical background - it's not as expressive as HTML. To present markdown on a page, you'll need a markdown parser that will convert markdown to HTML.

• Text: text is mostly used for excerpts, as links, images, and even line breaks are removed.

#Use Cases

• Raw: Use raw when you want to control the rendered output using our render libraries.
• JSON: Use JSON for the same as raw but when you also need embeds.
• HTML / Markdown: Use these when you need to make customizations and want to insert pre-built HTML or markdown into an app.
• Text: Use text when you want to provide the text as data to a script, such as making full-text search.

#Examples

This section takes a simple Rich Text piece with a title, a paragraph, a link, and bold text, and offers its JSON, HTML, Markdown, and Text representations.

#Rich Text embeds

For example, we can query all of those on our RichText field type content:

#Embed assets

You can also embed Assets and other models inside Rich Text as block, inline or link embeds.

Rich Text Asset Embeds UI

#Rich Text embeds & API types

With Rich Text Embeds enabled, your API will have some new types added. The name of your field will be now a type appended by RichText, and RichTextEmbeddedTypes inside your schema.

For example, if you had the model Post and field content, the types generates would be PostContentRichText, and PostContentRichTextEmbeddedTypes respectively.

The PostContentRichText type will look like the following:

type RichText {
  json: RichTextAST!
  html: String!
  markdown: String!
  text: String!
  references: [PostContentRichTextEmbeddedTypes!]!
}

The references field will be a union relation to the types you embedded, for example Asset.

You should use the references field when querying JSON to get the URL (with any transformations, handle, or any of the Asset fields.

The HTML response will return gcms-embed-type and gcms-embed-id data attributes for the embedded types. A block embed is returned as div and an inline embed as span with a data-gcms-embed-inline attribute. A link embed is returned as an a-tag with a data-gcms-embed-id and data-gcms-embed-type attribute.

Hygraph uses Slate 0.5 for RichTextAST.

#Mutations for Rich Text fields

When creating or updating entries, ensure your mutation payload matches the schema type shown in the API Playground. For localized models or fields, you must include a locale property. Incorrectly structured payloads are a common cause of Invalid payload / could not transform RichText errors.

#Create rich text fields

Provide the AST object directly. Do not wrap it in a property such as raw or json.

#Update rich text fields

Provide the AST object directly. Do not wrap it in a property such as raw or json.

#Create rich text fields with locale

Provide the AST object directly. Do not wrap it in a property such as raw or json.

#Update rich text fields with locale

Provide the AST object directly. Do not wrap it in a property such as raw or json.

#Use JSON representation of RTE for customization

You can work with the Rich Text field to take the data that the editors put in Hygraph, and manipulate it for display in the front end.

The following example shows data available on a blog post, with the Rich Text content in HTML and markdown:

Hygraph automatically serializes the content into HTML and/or markdown that the front end can simply display. This does not allow customization.

Instead of these two things, you can get the JSON representation, which will display as JSON AST in a tree with nested levels.

As you can see in the results tab of the above query, this breaks up the initial data into a JSON representation that a renderer can understand.

This allows you to take that data and manipulate it in order to override any default renderer or add renderers for custom elements, creating a custom display logic for your front end.

You will do this by creating an HTML element containing the manipulated data, which will then be rendered via the astToHtmlString method that's available on our Rich Text HTML renderer. We also have a React version of this.

By styling your Rich Text fields, you can either customize how your Rich Text will display throughout your website, or even have multiple types of Rich Text fields that do different things.

#Resources

• Hygraph's Rich Text editor: Hygraph's UI Rich Text field feature walkthrough.
• Styling Rich Text with TailwindCSS: Detailed tutorial on how to use the JSON representation from the RTE to create custom elements for each text-based element of Rich Text.
• Introducing the Hygraph React Rich Text Renderer: Blog post on how to render Hygraph documents using Rich Text in your application easily using our available packages.
• Rich Text editor UI guide: Guide on how to use Hygraph's Rich Text editor in the content editor of your project.