A lot of improvements have been made over the last few months which is great. But I thought I should keep adding to this especially the “Organisation” of files to hopefully keep going.
We have entities that could have 20+ files attached but I don’t yet move them into Fibery because of the limitations.
Since the Files field can now be displayed a a List view (which is great):
- If they look like Lists they should behave more like Lists. On click the file should open in side panel (I don’t like the lightbox). Maybe a CMD + Click could open in modal but default is to open in a side panel.
- Add properties for files. Then the properties could display on the List view just like regular entity fields. This opens up a lot more options to wrangle with many files. e.g. the list can be filtered and sorted by modified date, person who uploaded, tag for doc category, stage “new” or “checked” etc, and have a Comments discussion about specific files for collaboration.
- Separate permissions for file viewing v file download (some users are allowed to view the file but they cannot download the file). This is especially true for sensitive documents. Maybe this could be achieved somehow with this Lookup files field using relationships ?
Why I don’t like lightbox:
- Its jarringly different from the rest of the experience.
- Depending on the type of File there is different behaviour when you click. Sometimes the file downloads. Sometimes it opens modal. Sometimes it downloads file even if I click “Open in new tab”.
- I know that not all files can support viewing (please support at least Text/md) but the same interaction should happen when you click them.
- They could display like native “Documents” which display similar to an entity but without properties. Maybe the lightbox can be put in a frame?
And if the file type isn’t supported for viewing, then an error message with download option. This gives the user a way to “back out” or cancel and not download it if they don’t want to. Then it doesn’t matter if the file is supported for viewing or not, the same action will happen regardless i.e. Open a side panel and display either the file itself or a download button.
If you read this far 