[UX] do not lock the admin bar when a modal is active.

[klonos]

As we have it currently, when there's a modal open ("Add block" dialog in the Layout admin UI for example), the only thing that one can do with the background is scroll up/down. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but it was proven helpful quite a few times in the past for me in cases where accomplishing a task in the modal required me to see what is in the back of it. So, please do not disable that.

The other thing is that we lock the admin bar menu and treat it as if it is part of the background. I had numerous cases where I needed to navigate to another page in order to fill in information in the modal. In such cases, I resort in opening another tab, navigating to the site in question and then using the admin bar in the new tab to navigate to the admin section I was looking for. Now, if it were that the admin bar was not locked, I would have simply used the admin menu and would have right-clicked -> open in new tab on the link I needed.

The alternative is to close the dialog, right-click -> open in new tab on the link that you need and then re-open the dialog. This is really annoying though and might be ok if you realized that you need to do it right after the dialog opens. If you have actually filled in something in the dialog already, then :angry: ...pisses me off.

Not sure what the implications would be on mobile mode, but there is nothing I can think of right now. If not on by default, then can we at least have a "Keep active when a modal dialog is open." setting under /admin/config/administration/admin-bar?

[jenlampton]

I understand that frustration... unfortunately I think maybe that's just how modals work. They require input and intentionally prevent anything else from happening until they get it. I don't know if this is an internet-wide-problem or a problem Backdrop can do anything about.

[ghost]

Hmm, there no such thing as modal windows in an internet browser, except the "alert" window. This is just the usual race to have the highest z-index, and, as such, it's theme dependent. @klonos, just select "Default theme" as your administration theme, that's another world…

[Bojhan]

This is indeed largely related to the default implementation of the jquery modal. Much of this is on purpose because you don't have nice auto-save everywhere and you can easily navigate away if you don't pay attention. Doing this helps most end users.

[klonos]

I understand that this is how modals work, so I will also get it if this feature request is shot down. Just as an idea though, how easy would it be to switch all admin bar links to using target="_blank" whenever a modal is active? That would allow us to unlock the admin bar while at the same time clicking any link on it would open the target in another tab thus keeping the rest of the UI locked until action is taken in the modal.

[quicksketch]

We have the option of increasing the z-index of the admin bar to be above the jQuery UI mask, which is a div with the class ui-widget-overlay. This gets a z-index of 1000, placing it on top of everything and preventing any clicking on the underneath page.

One concern I have with this is that we need all the real-estate we can in a lot of situations, and having the admin bar active would probably require putting it above the dialog contents, leading to situations where the admin bar might obscure the dialog, or we'd need to reduce the available space used by the dialog.