[MGNLUI-2345] Text is not selectable (e.g. for Copy&Paste) in trees Created: 04/Nov/13  Updated: 05/Sep/19  Resolved: 05/Sep/19

Status: Closed
Project: Magnolia UI
Component/s: tree/list, user interaction
Affects Version/s: 5.1
Fix Version/s: None

Type: Bug Priority: Major
Reporter: Andreas Weder Assignee: Unassigned
Resolution: Obsolete Votes: 0
Labels: usability
Remaining Estimate: Not Specified
Time Spent: Not Specified
Original Estimate: Not Specified

Issue Links:
relation
is related to MGNLUI-2036 Text in error message is not selectable Closed
Template:
Acceptance criteria:
Empty
Task DoD:
[ ]* Doc/release notes changes? Comment present?
[ ]* Downstream builds green?
[ ]* Solution information and context easily available?
[ ]* Tests
[ ]* FixVersion filled and not yet released
[ ]  Architecture Decision Record (ADR)
Bug DoR:
[ ]* Steps to reproduce, expected, and actual results filled
[ ]* Affected version filled
Date of First Response:

 Description   

You can't currently select any text in a tree. This leads to usability issues in that e.g. users can't copy & paste text when working with the configuration in the config tree.



 Comments   
Comment by Andreas Weder [ 04/Nov/13 ]

This might be caused by the same issue.

Comment by Andreas Weder [ 04/Nov/13 ]

If I'm not mistaken, this is due to a CSS change implemented system-wide in order to fix the problem on the iPad, that the magnifying glass appeared when press&hold-ing a button in the action bar. It could be potentially easy to fix by just reverting that fix again: I'd rather have magnifying glasses appearing on a less-used devices than the usability issues we have currently.

Comment by Christopher Zimmermann [ 13/Nov/13 ]

This may have changed since original report but currently:
Text in lists is selectable.
Text in trees is theoretically selectable - if you drag over a whole tree you select the text, or if you use CMD-A to select all.
I think tree selection does not work currently simply due to drag & drop functionality - drag event is probably handled by vaadin so that the text selection on drag never gets called.
We probably need to rethink this. Could their be an item in context menu - "Select value" or "Copy value to clipboard"?
Assigning to Andreas for evaluation.

Comment by Andreas Weder [ 14/Nov/13 ]

Thanks for the research, Christopher. So there's no quick fix for this then.

An entry in the context menu is indeed an idea, but I'm not sure how it would work if I intended to copy a value or a key from a different column. Would it copy the value underneath the mouse pointer? Would the action have to be named more explicitly to make that clear (e.g. "copy path to clipboard", "copy date to clipboard", ...)? It probably wouldn't make sense to have one "copy" method for every column in the tree.

This looks to me like we or I need to research the problem some more and come up with a proper solution that works reliably across devices and input methods. It goes together with my feeling that we have to make some effort to consolidate mouse clicks, taps, opening and selection behavior, contextual menus and the rest of the lot. We need a comprehensive and consistent picture on how items are opened, handled, selected, and where I find what actions to work with an item I've selected. If we just come up with patches to fix single problems, that often causes other problems or inconsistent behavior across the entire web app. I've already had reports that e.g. Pulse and Favs don't work the same as apps do.

That being said, I wouldn't mind if we found a good, easy to implement patch to fix this problem

Comment by Andreas Weder [ 14/Nov/13 ]

Changed the issue title and texts to only mention trees and not lists any more.

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