Enhance truncation guidance

Update DS guidance to include more specific advise on truncation.

Who requested the changes? Include all stakeholders

Mike Moroze Robert Gary

Have a ‘standards’ question from Robert. I did a quick look but couldn’t find anything on handling long names. What I’ve seen in the public space is that you use the first ‘n’ characters then ‘…’ then the last ‘n’ characters (e.g., BobInFi….Yrly 2024). Do you know of a standard way to handle this?

Do you have thoughts on strategies for handling very long object names? We are considering making volume names as long as 256 characters. In some cases I think we’ll need to consider some type of truncation. In the past I think we found that truncating the end removed the only unique aspect of the name so perhaps front truncation is better???

Problem statment:

As a user:

I am a user of the platform.
I'm trying to quickly scan important information displayed in tables & name value pairs to complete my tasks efficiently.
But I'm often unable to discern critical data at a glance.
Because the text truncation in the UI cuts off important information such as serial number last digits
Which makes me feel frustrated and slows down my workflow, as I need to click into each item to see the full text, delaying my tasks.

Process & outcomes:

Research existing use cases on platform to support potential enhancement
- Truncation at start
- Truncation in middle
- Truncation at end
Connect with dev to discuss any impact of decision (does this impact code or just guidance)
Write draft guidance

Considerations -

Is the truncation rule is applied to the string, not just the container width (setting a max character V's a max width.)
Eg name value pair vs table cell/column width.
Rules for revealing full content, currently via tooltip

grommet / hpe-design-system

Enhance truncation guidance #3848

Update DS guidance to include more specific advise on truncation.

Who requested the changes? Include all stakeholders

Problem statment:

Process & outcomes: