What would you want from a new Document Library?

[ddraper]

This is a hypothetical question that aims to establish what people would want from a new version of the Document Library in Share. I'd like to understand if there is any desire for this or if people are actually very happy with the current YUI2 based Document Library?

It's fairly clear that there has been a lot of investment by lots of people into customizing the existing Document Library so it's not necessarily completely clear cut that there is any appetite for a new Document Library. 

However, if one was to be provided what sort of features would you like to see retained, added or even removed? Examples of features that could be added would be:

• automatic display of README.md files (like in GitHub, NPM, etc)
• dynamic customization / creation of views (adding custom metadata to table views, creating entirely new views)
• drag-and-drop version update of documents
• inline commenting
• inline editing of all metadata
• inline previewing of content
• improved accessibility
• improved customization
• improved rendering on mobile devices

Would any of these features be of interest? Are there any other features that you'd like to see added?

What about implementation details? There's already an alternative Aikau Document Library implementation (see https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2016/04/12/aikau-1063-support-for-versioned-librar...) but would you prefer to see a different implementation (using some other framework).

What about general user interface changes? Is there anything you'd like to see changed about the appearance or behaviour of the current Document Library?

Are there any actions that are missing? Or actions that you think should be removed?

What about the current views? Are they useful? Should any be changed? What new views would you like to see added?

[ddraper]

The requirement to allow users to customize the columns they see in views is actually more of a data issue than a UI issue. Implementing a solution to allow users to define their own views is actually very simple (and something that Aikau for example was specifically designed to be able to address).

However, the issue is where and how to store the data - for example...

• should the view be specific to the user or should the view be specific to the content
• should views be shared (where do you store shared views, who has control over the shared view, what happens if a user wants to customize a view owned by another user)
• if views are specific to content (which would make sense as different sites might contain different content) then are views inherited from parent to child?
• how does any of this scale?

Filtering is also something that is quite straight-forward too... it's effectively what the live search does and I actually think that filtering should be a capability that we add to all our new V1 REST APIs. Taking advantage of filtering in views is pretty straight forward and I agree that it is definitely something that should be part of a document library.

[cristinamr]

Hi Dave,

Suggestion here! Share UI (includes Doc Library) can be responsive. This suggestion can save a lot of valuable time in many cases 🙂

Cheers,

Cris.

[cesarista]

Hi Dave:

In my case, I would like custom content-type wizards for creating content. In the way of the old Alfresco Explorer wizards (I still remember them!) or something similar to Upload-plus addon functionality:

GitHub - softwareloop/uploader-plus: An Alfresco uploader that prompts for metadata 

Regards.

--C.

[ivanovpavel1983]

Hello. It would be good if Document Library could display and work with objects without content (inherited from the sys:base)

[cseickel]

I wish that there was a view that used a full featured grid control, rather than a simple html table.  Something like this:

Ext JS Kitchen Sink 

At the same time, it would be nice if you can add and remove columns in a similar way to the search manager screen for faceted search.

[cseickel]

Another nice feature would be an admin GUI to edit the display of an item in the Detailed View.  Something like the forms designer in the new Model Manager, where you can drag and drop widgets and simple properties.  The templates would be defined by content types.