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Product Updates

DatoCMS changelog for new features and general improvements
Content Management API
Creation of new records via API no longer requires to specify all fields
November 26th, 2021

This change was long overdue, and we're glad we were able to address it! 🥳

Suppose you have ie. a model with 10 fields, 9 of which are optional. Until now, when creating a record, you were required to specify... all 10 fields. If you didn't want any value for the optional ones, you were required to pass a null value in any case, or the API call would fail:

const { SiteClient } = require("datocms-client");
const client = new SiteClient("YOUR-API-TOKEN");
const record = await client.items.create({
itemType: "1234",
requiredField: "Lorem ipsum",
optionalField1: null,
optionalField2: null,
optionalField3: null,
optionalField4: null,
optionalField5: null,
optionalField6: null,
optionalField7: null,
optionalField8: null,
optionalField9: null,
});

In addition to being redundant and inconvenient, this was a maintainability problem over time, because when a new optional field gets added on the model, you need adapt every script and add that null value. Well, now optional fields can be omitted from the payload during creation:

const record = await client.items.create({
itemType: "1234",
requiredField: "Lorem ipsum",
});

Nice, simple and clean. Happy friday!