Enhancing AEM Dialogs: Creating a Custom Dropdown with Color Indicators

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) provides robust tools for building and customizing web components, but sometimes you need to enhance the authoring experience with custom UI elements. In this tutorial, we’ll demonstrate how to create a custom dropdown in AEM with color indicators that make selecting options more visually intuitive and engaging for content authors.

Non-members can access it here.

Introduction

Do you want to make your AEM dialogs more user-friendly? Dropdown options often need visual representation to make selection easier and faster for content authors. Associating colors with different options provides a quick, intuitive understanding of each choice. In this article, we’ll walk you through creating an AEM Coral UI dropdown component with custom colors next to each option — a perfect enhancement to elevate your authoring experience.

Step 1: Create an AEM Component with a Dialog

To start, create a new AEM component that requires a dropdown with color-coded options. This component will include a dialog (`cq:dialog`) where the dropdown field is defined.

Here’s an example of how to add a dropdown to the dialog using XML: