Replace Rows with Columns in designer

Berend Veldkamp

January 04, 2024 11:26

When designing separate layouts for portrait and landscape screens, it would help if the designer supported replacing a 'Rows' component with a 'Columns' component, and vice versa.

I now have to do this manually by moving the contents from my existing Rows to a new Columns, and then copying some or all of its properties (size, margin, visibility, ...)

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  Zack Robison

  February 07, 2024 00:06

  My eyes just popped out of my head, that is such a clever idea. Not sure how common a use case it is, but I've definitely gotten angry with myself over needing to rearrange my layout piece by piece.

  Side note, I'm going to try to remember this next time I need to do that.  Might be faster to open ctrl+shift+e and switch up a few tags than to move everything manually. 

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  Gareth Finney

  February 08, 2024 00:43

  Nice idea - got my vote

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  Gareth Evans

  February 09, 2024 16:38 Edited

  Hey Berend Veldkamp & regular VSW community crowd! I like this idea, though I feel that in order to describe this as a user story for the product team we'd want to understand the business value here. Why would this alternating option help you, is this entirely based on the time it takes to configure a layout for a portrait or landscape scenario or are there other factors here too? As a side note, are you spending significant time between these two layout scenarios? Any context or detail here helps inform us.

  And yes Zack Robison if you're bold enough to pop the hood and put your hand in there, this could be an approach though there is risk involved. Designer is, at a high level, a guided tool that allows you to produce effective apps through JSON output. What Berend is proposing I think is a good example of how Designer could take layout configuration that would be reflected well in JSON and reduce configuration time.

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  Berend Veldkamp

  February 13, 2024 08:05

  Hi @...,

  I first thought of this when I had already had a portrait design for a small-screen device, and had to add a landscape layout. I think this may be most important use-case for me. On larger screens it may be less of an issue because there's more screen real estate anyway.

  But I also remember I had to switch between rows and columns a few times, when I started a new layout, and wasn't quite sure which of the two would fit my design best. Sometimes you don't know in advance how wide or tall the contained components are going to be exactly, and you just need to try different options to see which fits best. It would be nice if we could quickly switch between them.

  Now that I think about it, maybe this could be a single component with an 'orientation' setting, that could be set to horizontal or vertical. The result would be the same as switching between rows and columns, but maybe slightly more intuitive.

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