Combined select appearance options (specifically minimal with columns)

[ahblake]

(breaking this out from webforms notes as it's not WF specific)

@LN

I was surprised to read that minimal might combine with columns-n in Collect so I tried it out.

It's funny you say that, a few weeks ago I was just about to submit a feature request to allow the minimal appearance to work with image / big-image / columns but luckily I tried it before posting . And it worked! And it's great!

Subsequent searching turned up these two posts, emphasis mine:

@LN

• The minimal appearance for selects should now be possible to combine with any other select appearance. This is particularly useful with autocomplete in the case of a long list.

@Grzesiek2010

Yes you can combine all appearance we support, that means taking select_one as an example you can even have something like:
minimal quick columns-2 no-buttons autocomplete
and the order doesn't matter.

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@LN

In Web Forms, minimal choices are in a drop down. What kind of presentation would you expect? Still a dropdown but multiple choices on each row? What's the use case?

So, the driver for this was: When creating / updating an asset entity and one of the fields is the drawing it's on, this question was in the middle of a field-list and there were many options, each with image & big-image. This resulted in a stuttery, laggy scroll on device, and a very long scroll to get past it, plus no way to search the list. Switching this to minimal autocomplete columns-5 made:

• the question appear compact in the field list
• let that screen scroll smoothly again
• allowed for search-filtering the list by label
• kept thumbnails visible and allowed opening the large version
• reduced total scroll height via multiple columns.

What would I like to see in WF? Having the images appear with the labels & big images able to open (but this is a separate feature unrelated to minimal) and having n columns in the dropdown if possible (noting per below that small portrait devices will likely have problems with >2 columns). It's less of an issue on a larger desktop screen, but if used on mobile, having minimal take over the entire screen (similar to geometry) and render with the columns.

@LN

It seems to partially work but in my simple form labels aren't displayed correctly.

My appearance where I am using it is minimal autocomplete columns-5 and I have both image and big-image and it works great in Collect. Probably as my minimum column width is larger than yours and allows text to render (some labels wrap). I can see that on a handset, yours has no labels in portrait but they appear in landscape. if you used columns-2 on a handset it would be ok. columns is likely safest as it should use 2-5 depending on screen size.