isaacwhite
commented
3 years ago This is a great idea! We could start by including the full markup of all subitems in the page, and add a bit of lightweight css/js on top of that to enable expanding and collapsing.
We could also consider storing the state on expanded/collapsed items in local storage so that personal browsing preferences are preserved without cluttering large sites for most users.
Problem Description
When there are nested folders I want to see them in listings. This helps me understand how all the documents are organized without having to click on individual folders and inspect them.
Feature
Show nested folders in directory listings.
Additional Information
In Google Drive for shared drives this information is available, but you have to click on the triangle next to drives to expand them. Because the Google Drive listing is a static sidebar displaying all folders and having limited space, this UX makes sense. However, library listings are not limited to a sidebar. If there is no home page content then the directory listing takes the entire page.
So I would suggest defaulting to a fully-exploded folder view (that can be contracted) as long as the number of folders are small enough.
There may be some other examples of this to look to. We could say that this project is a browser-based read-only file explorer tool with integration to show some special files. A github repo page would fall into this category. They show a README below the file explorer and auto-expand empty directories only. Gitlab does the same.
Confluence shows directories in a sidebar somewhat similar to Google Drive.