Should email previews be attached to Panes?

Jay

Do you like that email previews are attached to panes? Or would you prefer it if they lived outside of panes? They could be a drawer coming out from the right side of the screen, maybe with a way to toggle collapsing the previews open and closed?

Having them attached to panes is now causing a technical problem in that they take a while to load, and opening an email in a new pane or board opens a whole new instance of it and has to load from scratch. If we made them global they would only have to open once. We originally did it this way because our old Gmail plugin didn’t take so long to render previews, but with the new Email plugin it’s causing a problem…

Or if you prefer them attached to panes, it’s possible we could find a way to reuse a global preview but attached to panes, but we would not be able to display more than one at a time.

DaveT

So this leaves the email pane - ie., the pane showing your inbox? You’re just taking about the pane that opens to display a preview of the currently selected email from the email pane?

Assuming that’s the case, I’d need to know how the email-handling functionality would change. Ie., are there things that I would no longer be able to do with the proposed change? Equally are there new things that I could do?

Jay

The pane showing your inbox would stay the same, and all features/functionality would stay the same. It would just be changing the behavior where when you click an email it slides the preview out from the right side of the pane. It would instead slide out from the right side of the screen and not scroll with the pane.

DaveT

Thanks for explaining - in which case I’m not too worried about making the change, especially if it makes things easier at your end.

andrew

I like the current way of opening it next to the pane that it was opened from.

Reusing the pane globally so that it opens more quickly would be an improvement.

How about once it is loaded, when it is closed, just hide it and when opened again, reuse it instead of loading it again?

Sometimes I find it would be nice to keep a message from my inbox open at the same time I keep a message from my outline open. Perhaps you could create one message pane attached to a source pane when a message is opened and keep that pane hidden when closed rather than destroying and reloading with the next message opened … In other words, keep up to one attached messasge pane per source pane. This isn’t super critical if having more than one message pane is challenging.

Regardless of the solution, it would be extremely helpful if the message that is currently shown is highlighted in some way in the source pane, whether it be the Inbox or outline, so it is easy to see in the source pane which message is open. This is useful when you want to act on the open message so it is easy to quickly identify and grab/drag or select and archive/delete.

Jay

andrew The technical issue is React only reuses the same element if it’s in the same place in the page structure. So if an email preview is opened in a different pane or different board, React creates a whole new element there, so it would load from scratch. There is probably a way we could hack up a solution to reuse the same element, but I just wanted to make sure everyone prefers the preview attached to the pane so it’s worth the trouble.

And I’ve put a task to highlight the selected item on my todo list.

Jerud

Could you have the email message open in a “popup pane”?

I generally use Mailbird so my input here is not super-relevant…but I’m in favor of anything that leads to more development of popup panes because I think they have huge potential for Legend in general 😅

andrew

An issue that you should be addressed in this process is that often when I have a message opened from the Inbox pane, and then open a message from the outline and it opens a new message pane, the message that is opened is the previous one that was opened from the Inbox. I have to close the new message pane and then reopen the message from the outline in order for the proper message to be shown in the message pane.