Open entity browser with one click from Entity Browser IEF widget

Created on 3 August 2016, about 9 years ago
Updated 19 August 2025, 4 days ago

Configuration
Configure a media field in the form display with the inline entity form complex widget and allow the user to create new entities with IEF and add existing entities using an entity browser.

Adding new entities with IEF works fine – the button Add new entities opens the IEF as expected and only shows the relevant buttons Create media and Cancel.

Problem
Choosing Add existing media requires the user to click Select entities in a second step to open the entity browser. I think it would be more intuitive to open the entity browser directly in the first step, because that is what the user would expect. For the fact that it is required to select entities before it is possible to add them, the button Add Media does not have any effect in the first step and would rather confuse the user.

Another strange behavior is, that the images selected in the entity browser will not show up in the IEF before clicking the Add media button. There is no immediate visual feedback, so the user could think that something went wrong or even clicking Select entities again, instead of Add media. For me this additional click to add the selected images is not really needed and adds unnecessary complexity to the UI. The buttons with their present styling/placement and wording are already a bit confusing.

Possible Solution
Add new media opens the IEF inside the node edit form. No changes needed.
Add existing media opens the selected entity browser with one click. The selected entities are added automatically to the form, without an additional step. The buttons could be visually separated or structured by their actual use case.

Are there already any plans about this topic?

Feature request
Status

Needs review

Version

2.0

Component

User interface

Created by

🇩🇪Germany abaier

Live updates comments and jobs are added and updated live.
  • Needs tests

    The change is currently missing an automated test that fails when run with the original code, and succeeds when the bug has been fixed.

Sign in to follow issues

Comments & Activities

Not all content is available!

It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.

Production build 0.71.5 2024