[RFC] Editing Fields Inline on Lists

[kiler129]

Overview (aka. TL;DR)

Editing fields in-line/on list is a common functionality present in systems where users' workflows require editing simple textual data at-mass over multiple entities. This RFC aims to bring support of editing fields directly on index lists in EAB:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1227834/215312128-90e67a59-410a-4463-a1ed-d7cfea2506de.mp4

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In-line edit UX 😃

Ignoring the obvious spreadsheet-driven workflows, there are a myriad of scenarios where in-line edits are prevalent. Examples include:

• updating remaining amounts on a list of supplies in a laboratory
• inputting test grades for all students who took a test
• updating story point value on a list of tasks in a sprint

One of the concrete examples in the app I'm developing is adding common measurements to animals. The physical workflow mandates mass-entry after measurements are taken for multiple animals.

🐌 The current workflow can be seen below:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1227834/215312171-204d6de1-692c-4be3-9dc8-deb068d8ea15.mp4

🚀 Now, let's try with inline "edits":

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1227834/215312244-3e079fef-df93-4418-addb-d660642d00f6.mp4

This is way faster 🎉 It offers a realtime and non-intrusive feedback to the user as well. Naturally, these two ways are not 1:1 comparable, as the full edit contains many more options, but the in-line style can eliminate the majority of "full edits".

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Scope 🔍

This feature can get quite complex very quickly. To make it useful I needed to go beyond just simple editing of a text field, as from the beginning my use-case required actually adding a new related entity (as you can probably see on the video).

The planned scope:

• a new InlineEditableField which is able to transparently submit a value to the backend
• the field should be easy to use and pretty much a drop-in replacement for any scalar type like TextField or NumberField
• the field should allow for editing a single scalar entity field
• the field should be flexible enough to add new related records
• it should support nested embeddables (to add to the continued efforts from e.g. https://github.com/EasyCorp/EasyAdminBundle/pull/4882)
• this isn't meant to introduce a full-fledged API, thus it should utilize all fields & forms already present in users' applications. However, it should respond with proper HTTP codes etc.

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Implementation 👨‍💻

What is shown in this RFC isn't a mock-up. It is a working implementation tested in my project. The code isn't PR-ready just yet, however it was written specifically with upstreaming in mind ;) The changes needed aren't extensive.

Data persistence

To support the data persistence changes need to be made to new() and edit() to support POST/PUT/PATCH with application/json payload. While using the standard POST and normal form handling seemed feasible at first, it quickly became a nightmare in our project. There were many reasons like issues with JS FormData not handling arrays, or Symfony Forms not expecting a partial update w/PATCH. The changes to properly support this part include:

• ~80 SLOC, reusing Form::submit()
• a new protected function getResponseAfterAjaxSave() (draft name) method on AbstractCrudController, which serves a purpose similar to getRedirectResponseAfterSave() and provides a new display value

Field construction

Providing the new field is actually more complicated. The new fields supports the following options:

• target controller: configured to the parent entity CRUD by default
• target action: Action::EDIT by default, can be changed to Action::NEW
• method: can be specified; by default uses PATCH for edit and POST for new
• automatically include parent entity ID on edits
• allows to include an extra array with additional data; this is indispensable when creating related entities, as there are e.g. required fields
• the whole thing is ~200 SLOC

The frontend went through many revisions in my case. Currently, the form for each field is lazy-created as needed by a vanilla JS. The reason for that is provisioning for displaying a list with 5+ editable columns and 100+ rows. That would introduce a severe DOM pollution and a heavy backend load to render something which isn't used 99% of the time (i.e. when browsing lists). Nevertheless, it uses standard Bootstrap popovers & <form> elements. The only custom thing is supporting Esc to abort edit.
The form creation process support setting a size of the field, postfix, name of the "save" button, as well as the optional field placeholder.

Known limitations

• the implementation by design supports only scalars (i.e. no selects or other complex things)
• validation is delegated to the server

Rationale 👍

I saw this asked in many issues, I was able to quickly locate one: https://github.com/EasyCorp/EasyAdminBundle/issues/365. In addition, this feature doesn't set a precedent due to already-present "AJAX".

The only dynamic list field present in EAB is BooleanField, which can be rendered as a "switch". While changing it in any way is out of scope for this issue, it can easily be done. The one-off code in AbstractCrudController::edit() could be removed. The current implementation will certainly be able to handle 1/0 update with just minor JS changes to BooleanField.

WDYT?

[john-dufrene-dev]

Awesome !

@kiler129 do you you have a démo of this feature liké in your videos ?

[abozhinov]

Awesome! Do you need help creating PR?

[Merize]

Hello, i would be very intereseted as well, if you need any help i would be glad to contribute

[MrDyn]

Great work ! Maybe i can help too ?

[gido]

I really love this idea (used it with SonataAdmin mostly to toggle boolean value from the list view).

In term of UX we need to help the user to understand visually that the field is editable inline in the list.

[El-Profesor]

A must have feature ! Great work.

@kiler129: Why the following limitation (« by design ») ?

the implementation by design supports only scalars (i.e. no selects or other complex things)

Thanks in advance.

[dMangoldBlzn]

@kiler129: how did you get the embedded controller to work in your "current workflow" video?

[filiplikavcan]

Wouldn't it more "EasyAdmin" way to have a new QUICK_EDIT action which would add "Quick edit" button which would open modal window with the selected fields in the quick edit form?

[Michelium]

Wouldn't it more "EasyAdmin" way to have a new QUICK_EDIT action which would add "Quick edit" button which would open modal window with the selected fields in the quick edit form?

Would probably. The real EasyAdmin way is to open the page of course but users do request this sometime to make edits a lot quicker than opening a modal or page.

[kira0269]

Very interested ! Could this feature be implemented with Symfony UX Turbo ? Or is it a better idea to not increase the number of dependencies of the the bundle ?

[speller]

Any progress on this awesome feature?

[alexandru-burca]

Cool feature, would like to have it