In 'group' field, required and defaultValue do nothing

[abaco]

As of version 1.1.4, fields of type 'group' are always required, regardless of the value of the required property. I think this is a waste of expressiveness, especially since the semantics of an optional group field are straightforward: the whole field may be undefined.

For example in one of my collections I'd like to have an optional CTA with required fields. I may or may not have a CTA, but if I have one it must have both label and URL. This is how I would like to express that:

…
  {
    name: 'cta',
    type: 'group',
    fields: [
      {
         name: 'label',
         type: 'text',
         required: true,
      },
      {
         name: 'url',
         type: 'text',
         required: true,
      },
    ],
  },
…

But this currently requires the whole group to be defined, so it complains about undefined label and url.

The semantics of defaultValue are consistent with those of required, namely it's ignored. Now I can't come up with a good example, but I guess it might be useful to have different default values for single fields and for the whole group.

[tkrotoff]

Related discussion: https://payloadcms.com/community-help/discord/optional-group-field

So there is no way to say "This whole thing can either be undefined, or if it exists, you are guaranteed to have these fields in it"?

There is no solution, the suggested hack "put a condition on the group" doesn't work.
The data returned if cta is not filled by the user, is cta: {} instead of cta: null and doesn't match the generated TypeScript types

[DanRibbens]

As an update to this very old discussion. At some point we did add defaultValue support for groups.
For validation you may have to do a custom validate function, for example:

{
    name: 'cta',
    type: 'group',
    fields: [
      {
         name: 'label',
         type: 'text',
         required: false, // this is not required so you can remove this
		 validate: (value, { siblingData }) => {
			if ( !value && siblingData.url) return 'Please provide a label for the the CTA'
            return true
		},
      },
      {
         name: 'url',
         type: 'text',
         required: false, // this is not required so you can remove this
		 validate: (value, { siblingData }) => {
			if ( !value && siblingData.label) return 'Please provide a URL for the CTA'
            return true
		},
      },
    ],
  },

[tkrotoff]

This is a hack for what is be a basic feature 😕

You won't have proper TypeScript types cta?: { label: string; url: string; } | null and the endpoint won't return what you expect