Swap in your own React components

While designing the Payload Admin panel, we determined it should be as minimal and straightforward as possible to allow easy customization and control. There are many times where you may want to completely control how a whole view or a field works. You might even want to add in your own routes entirely. In order for Payload to support that level of customization without introducing versioning / future-proofing issues, Payload provides for a pattern to supply your own React components via your Payload config.

To swap in your own React component, first, consult the list of available component overrides below. Determine the scope that corresponds to what you are trying to accomplish, and then author your React component accordingly.

You can override a set of admin panel-wide components by providing a component to your base Payload config's admin.components property. The following options are available:

Full example:

payload.config.js

import { buildConfig } from 'payload/config'
import {
  MyCustomNav,
  MyCustomLogo,
  MyCustomIcon,
  MyCustomAccount,
  MyCustomDashboard,
  MyProvider,
} from './customComponents';

export default buildConfig({
  admin: {
    components: {
      Nav: MyCustomNav,
      graphics: {
        Icon: MyCustomIcon,
        Logo: MyCustomLogo,
      },
      views: {
        Account: MyCustomAccount,
        Dashboard: MyCustomDashboard,
      },
      providers: [MyProvider],
    },
  },
});

For more examples regarding how to customize components, look at the following examples.

You can override components on a Collection-by-Collection basis via each Collection's admin property.

As with Collections, You can override components on a global-by-global basis via their admin property.

All Payload fields support the ability to swap in your own React components. So, for example, instead of rendering a default Text input, you might need to render a color picker that provides the editor with a custom color picker interface to restrict the data entered to colors only.

Fields support the following custom components:

When swapping out the Field component, you'll be responsible for sending and receiving the field's value from the form itself. To do so, import the useField hook as follows:

import { useField } from 'payload/components/forms'

type Props = { path: string }

const CustomTextField: React.FC<Props> = ({ path }) => {
  const { value, setValue } = useField<Props>({ path })

  return <input onChange={e => setValue(e.target.value)} value={value.path} />
}

There are times when a custom field component needs to have access to data from other fields. This can be done using getDataByPath from useWatchForm as follows:

import { useWatchForm } from 'payload/components/forms';

const DisplayFee: React.FC = () => {
  const { getDataByPath } = useWatchForm();

  const amount = getDataByPath('amount');
  const feePercentage = getDataByPath('feePercentage');

  if (amount && feePercentage) {
    return (
      <span>The fee is ${(amount * feePercentage) / 100}</span>
    );
  }
};

The document ID can be very useful for certain custom components. You can get the id from the useDocumentInfo hook. Here is an example of a UI field using id to link to related collections:

import { useDocumentInfo } from 'payload/components/utilities';

const LinkFromCategoryToPosts: React.FC = () => {
  const { id } = useDocumentInfo();

  // id will be undefined on the create form
  if (!id) {
    return null;
  }

  return (
    <a href={`/admin/collections/posts?where[or][0][and][0][category][in][0]=[${id}]`} >
      View posts
    </a>
  )
};

You can easily add your own custom routes to the Payload Admin panel using the admin.components.routes property. Payload currently uses the extremely powerful React Router v5.x and custom routes support all the properties of the React Router <Route /> component.

Custom routes support the following properties:

* An asterisk denotes that a property is required.

Custom route components

Your custom route components will be given all the props that a React Router <Route /> typically would receive, as well as two props from Payload:

Example

You can find examples of custom route views in the Payload source code /test/admin/components/views folder. There, you'll find two custom routes:

1. A custom view that uses the DefaultTemplate, which is the built-in Payload template that displays the sidebar and "eyebrow nav"
2. A custom view that uses the MinimalTemplate - which is just a centered template used for things like logging in or out

To see how to pass in your custom views to create custom routes of your own, take a look at the admin.components.routes property of the Payload test admin config.

As your admin customizations gets more complex you may want to share state between fields or other components. You can add custom providers to do add your own context to any Payload app for use in other custom components within the admin panel. Within your config add admin.components.providers, these can be used to share context or provide other custom functionality. Read the React context docs to learn more.

Payload exports its SCSS variables and mixins for reuse in your own custom components. This is helpful in cases where you might want to style a custom input similarly to Payload's built-ini styling, so it blends more thoroughly into the existing admin UI.

To make use of Payload SCSS variables / mixins to use directly in your own components, you can import them as follows:

@import '~payload/scss';

In any custom component you can get the selected locale with the useLocale hook. Here is a simple example:

import { useLocale } from 'payload/components/utilities';

const Greeting: React.FC = () => {
  const locale = useLocale();

  const trans = {
    en: 'Hello',
    es: 'Hola',
  };

  return (
    <span> { trans[locale] } </span>
  );
};