DataViews Grid layout: Improve support for hidden titles

[andrewserong]

What problem does this address?

In the Grid layout of DataViews if you set showTitle to false and don't have any fields visible, there's a whitespace displayed beneath each item in the grid, that only serves to contain the actions dropdown. How might we also hide this, so that the Grid view could be a simple grid of items with a balanced gap between each item in the grid?

Here is a screenshot of how it looks if you hide all fields and set showTitle to false:

What is your proposed solution?

What if we:

• Allow the title field to be hidden, so that if it's set not to show, users can still set it to be revealed again
• When the title / all fields are hidden, ensure that there's still an aria-label or other approach used so that the title is accessible even if not visually displayed
• Move or hide the actions dropdown. I.e. could it be displayed on hover like we do for the checkbox for multi-selection?

[jameskoster]

Maybe when the title is hidden it still appears on hover? I guess that would address the a11y issue too.

media-title.mp4

Do we also need to work out where the actions go if the title is hidden and there is no media field? Or did we make the media field mandatory?

[jameskoster]

I suppose we’ll need to consider scenarios where the title is hidden but other fields are visible, and the technique I suggested above probably wouldn’t handle that case very well.

This makes me wonder whether this is a higher level abstraction; less about hiding the title, and more about ensuring a clean grid layout consisting only of previews.

Maybe there’s a new configuration option which hides all fields except the media field. Title/checkbox/actions menu would all appear on hover as demonstrated above. When this option is true, the Properties section of the view options dialog would be hidden.

Edit: I think this approach could also solve the conundrum about what to do if both the title and the media field are hidden. Basically that wouldn't be possible. The 'Preview only' option would only be available when there's a media field, and when there isn't a media field we should lock the title so it's always visible.

[talldan]

Do we also need to work out where the actions go if the title is hidden and there is no media field? Or did we make the media field mandatory?

I also have a similar observation. At the moment for most dataviews you can hide everything but the title, so if you can now also hide the title then it means you might have a dataview with completely empty items. For example, here's what the template list looks like if the everything is hidden, and now image the title is not there either 😄

It might be that in cases where dataviews has a title that's hidden, the media has to be mandatory.

[jameskoster]

For me this points towards the 'Preview only' option being the right direction. The actions menu trigger can appear on hover in the top right corner, similar to the checkbox.

[andrewserong]

For me this points towards the 'Preview only' option being the right direction. The actions menu trigger can appear on hover in the top right corner, similar to the checkbox.

Agreed. I'd like to give this a shot, but might not have much time to get to it this week — feel free to jump in if anyone else would like to give it a try, otherwise I'll follow up when I can 🙂

[andrewserong]

Update: I've made a start on the preview only idea and have opened up a WIP PR in #71289. I'll continue on with it next week! (Not ready for review but it seems to prove out how it could work)

[oandregal]

Was testing some field configurations and ran into this one: a view without fields (empty array) and also no title, media, or description fields. This is how it looks: you can run actions on items you don't see, and (in grid) you can even trigger the renderItemLink behavior:

Screen.Recording.2025-08-21.at.17.18.49.mov

I'd think DataViews shouldn't render anything in this scenario, as if the data was empty?