Implement :disabled property on Field class about contentful-management.rb

[pxlpnk]

Thank you for your input, keep it coming 👯

There is a bit of a discrepancy between what the user interface allows you to do and what the api allows.
Basically the UI tries to prevent you from breaking stuff, the api on the other hand gives you way more and less opinionated access to content types and entries.
In general deleting a field from a content type before it is activated is ok. However the api will not (at the moment) stop you from deleting a field from an activated content type. Once a content type is activated the field should be disabled.

For the request: adding the disable field makes total sense, make destroy behave like disable is the wrong way to go in my opinion and the api should let you know that this is a bad idea.
I will discuss this with the backend team and will add the disable feature to the roadmap for the gem.

Could you maybe share your code?

[jsdalton]

Makes sense. I actually ended up not deleting any fields, because in my use case I'm trying to delete fields on already activated content types. So ultimately, being able to explicitly disable / reenable fields is the feature that works.

First and foremost, actually adding a property that tracks the disabled status of the field is the most helpful step:

        ::Contentful::Management::Field.class_eval do
          # Contentful Management gem doesn't keep disabled, so monkeypatch it here
          # until this gets implemented
          property :disabled, :boolean
        end

Doing that, disabled just becomes one more property to manage. So for example to disable a given field, I'm doing something like this:

          # Where field_id is the ID of the field we're trying to disable
          fields = content_type.fields.map do |field|
            if field.id == field_id
              field.disabled = true
            end
            field
          end
          content_type.update(fields: fields)