Currently-selected entry should appear in nav list no matter what the filter is

[rmunn]

Describe the bug
I found the user experience of typing into the filter to be confusing. I had an entry "Apple", and entries "foo", "bar", and "quux". I had the "Apple" selected and was looking at its fields, and I typed "x" into the filter. The result was that I jumped to the "quux" entry because it was now the first (and only) entry in the filtered list. But I was not expecting that typing into the filter would change the entry I was looking at.

I think we want to add a concept of "pinned" entries, which will appear at the top of the navigation list no matter what the filter is set to. They should have something to mark them as different, so there's a visual indication of why these entries appear even though the filter would exclude them. For now, the only "pinned" entry would be the one that is currently selected, but in the future we might expand that concept (for example, allowing the user to "pin" a few entries from search results so that they can switch between them easily).

Once we have this feature, then we could change the behavior of the "New Entry" button: instead of changing the current search filter so that the new entry will appear in the list, it could simply pin the newly-created entry so that it's guaranteed to appear in the list, then navigate to it.

[hahn-kev]

can you give me an example of another app with a master detail layout (list on the left, selected item details on the right) where filtering the list does not change the selected item? Most of the examples I can think of have tabs (like vs code) so that's not really a comparison (and I don't want to add the complication of tabs).

I looked at gmail in the browser, you can add a reading pane which shows the selected email on the left/bottom. However if you search for an email then it kinda reloads the whole list and clears your selection. Our UI does not really match since we're filtering the visible list vs searching your whole inbox.

Steam does this, where there's a list of games on the left and your selected game shows on the right. When you filter the list it does not change the view on the right (showing the selected game) however it does not force the selected game to be in the list on the left. This is what I would suggest we do. It would introduce at least one edge case where you load the page with a filter set and an entry selected and the entry is not in the list fetched from the server, the client would then need to handle that and explicitly fetch the entry from the list.

The idea of pinning sounds similar to how vs code handles open files, but that also has tabs and such which I think is overkill (and confusing for our target audience) so I would rather avoid it.

[hahn-kev]

one more comparison. In FLEx you can filter specific columns, under the column header there's a filter dropdown, when you change the filter it will keep your entry selected if it's still in the view, however if the selected entry is filtered out then the first entry visible is selected.

[hahn-kev]

Tim and I chatted about this, we agreed that it's fine to show an entry on the right side that's not in the list on the left. Thanks for bringing this up Robin!

[myieye]

There may be cases where we'd like to navigate the entry list to show the selected editor (e.g. when creating the entry or on page load when there's an entryId in the URL), but I think that can be a progressive enhancement we might get to eventually 😉.

@rmunn Thanks for bringing up the idea of pinning entries. I think it's interesting.
I think it's probably a bit too "exotic" to try to add it add this stage i.e. it's unclear to me how much people would want it and there's so much basic functionality still missing.

[myieye]

I've created Decouple entry-list and editor.
Because we're not sure if this issue is something we want to tackle, I'd be inclined to close it for now.

[rmunn]

Agreed. #1372 is probably going to cover this, and it'll be a long time before allowing users to pin entries will be useful. Closing for now, might reopen further down the road.

[myieye]

@rmunn Thanks 🙂