Dynamic Collection Cell Size

[T0mC]

The collection widget allows us to show property information automatically on the screen for many things, without the need for manual intervention. The issue is that you can't use the new extendable containers or even dynamic panels widget inside of a collection cell, due to the height of the cell being fixed through the collection widget properties. This would be useful for drilling down into more detailed information or to split out the data for the cell you've clicked on. My proposal is that an option is added to the collection widget, that allows (at least) the height of each cell to change dynamically, maybe based on the height of the mashup it contains, so when you expand a container in the cell mashup, the cell grows with it.

[Billy_Milligan]

I would benefit from this as well @T0mC 

[uyngvesson]

This would be very useful when building dynamic dashboard like mashups where the size of each selected mashup might be very dynamic.

[T0mC]

After discussions with PTC, we have found a decent solution for now, but with a compromise of speed/performance. Currently this involves 2 session parameters - an asset list json (as a string), and a toggle list json (as a string), utilisation of the 'mashup height' collection property (as a field) as well as an isExpanded field on the data that's passed into the collection.

• When the mashup loads, an asset list is initialised in the session parameters with each asset as a key in a json structure and a value of true/false (false on load) for whether the cell is expanded.
• When a button is clicked in the collection cell it passes a message to the asset list to toggle it to true.
• The service that puts the data into the collection widget then has an if statement that sets the appropriate mashup height if expanded, in addition to the isExpanded field, based on that asset list JSON.
• Inside the cell, a container is set to expanded based on the isExpanded mashup parameter.

The caveat comes from having to reload the collection widget each time you expand the cell with the updated mashup height and isExpanded. If you have many items in the collection, this introduces longer loading times - especially when expanding the cell shows even more information. Buffering the data in another session parameter here could be an option to improve loading times slightly.

Therefore despite some sort of a solution being available currently, the next part of this idea is that the collection widget is improved to have a smarter method of retaining data through a resize of a cell, to avoid having to recall the data service, therefore reducing the load times.

[olivierlp]

Will consider for a future release.

[atiwari-4]

Hello! 

Thank you for your idea and feedback.

We're working on a new robust and performant collection widget and this functionality is planned in the next two years' roadmap as part of the new Collection Widget. 

Regards,

Ayush Tiwari

Director, ThingWorx Product Management