A Closer look at Entity Forms and Entity Lists created by the Create Portal Content Wizard

In my post about the Create Portal Content Wizard, I talked about how easy it is to add content to the portal using point-and-click configuration, and demonstrated that the Wizard creates a whole lot of records in the background for you so that you don’t have to. It’s like magic! It certainly does beat having to spend the time configuring Entity Forms, Lists, Permissions, and web pages all from scratch. However, the Wizard also has its limitations. There are several scenarios that it simply can’t manage, including some fairly basic ones. The Wizard can also leave you with a fair bit of manual work or cleanup to do, depending on what you’re building.

In order to better understand the Wizard, I figure now’s the time to spell out exactly what records actually get created by the wizard. To do this, we’ll go through the different options for configuring a list (we care mostly about displaying organization entities, so that’s the focus of this article) and then see exactly what configurations are created with each and what changes occur with the different settings. If you aren’t familiar with the Wizard, I explain the steps for using it here. Read that first, then come back - this article is more of a deep dive.

Let’s start with the basic case where we are not adding the ability to create or edit, and we do not require portal visitors to sign in to see the list. Note the field selections in the diagram below. The website, Page name, Title, Layout, Partial URL, Parent Page, and Publishing State can be whatever you want them to be – these don’t affect the outcome (well actually, they do, but not in a way that we are interested in - we can about the forms and lists and these don’t affect those).

Here we are using a Custom Entity called “Foo”. It’s just a basic, standard entity with a lookup to a contact and not much else – but you could easily use any other custom entity you want from your own scenarios – it’s just a placeholder. Just make sure it’s got a N:1 relationship to Contact. Don’t worry if your relationship name differs from later screenshots in this post.

We’ll set the Display organization entity in the portal switch to Yes, and then select our custom Foo entity. In the past we’ve used Leads and Contacts, but here we’ll stick with our custom entity, which is actually the most basic case. Choose whichever Form and Views you wish. The only fields that we are going to change across our different scenarios are those beginning with “Allow record creation”. Notably, we are allowing anonymous access and not allowing record creation for this first case.

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