issue_comments

I've now added two new plugin hooks: menu_links() and table_actions().

I'm going to close this issue. Further work (on column actions and and database actions) can happen in separate tickets, but I won't include them in Datasette 0.51 since they're much less interesting than table and instance actions.

For the table actions: attaching it to a cog icon next to the table name could make sense.

This is the column action icon at twice the size, color #666.

Row action menus are a question mark for me. Adding them to the table page itself could get really noisy - though maybe they're a vertical ... menu at the end of the row? They could also go on the row.html template, though that page is rarely used at the moment.

I'm going to skip row actions for the moment and concentrate on the other four, which I know I have use-cases for.

I'm going to dedicate this issue to thinking about action menus. #981 added column action menus, others to build could be:

• Table action menus (for things like configure FTS, edit schema)
• Database action menus (import CSV file into this table)
• Instance action menus (manage users, import CSV into this instance)
• Column action menus (already there, plugins could include extract this column)
• Row action menus?

And for instance-level actions (linking to datasette-import-csv for example) an actions menu anchored against a burger-bar menu icon in the navigation bar.

Next step is to design where these will go and what they will look like - in particular the navigation links that lead to plugins such as datasette-upload-csvs and datasette-configure-fts and datasette-edit-schema.

Twitter conversation about drop-down menu solutions that are accessible, fast loading and use minimal JavaScript: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1272974294545395712

I really like the approach taken by GitHub Primer, which builds on top of HTML <summary> <details> tags: https://primer.style/css/components/dropdown

Once I've defined what these are they can be implemented using the existing pluggy mechanism.

Maybe there are a few things here: * A mechanism for adding actions - essentially menu items - to tables and rows and queries and the index page * A way of defining blocks on the page where a plugin can add an entire block of custom HTML - above and below the table, or at the top of the index page for example.

Anything fancier than this can be achieved using JavaScript - provided there are documented blocks with IDs that JavaScript code can then manipulate in sensible ways.

I just hacked around this again in datasette-search-all, which abuses the description_source_license block to add a search for to the top of the index.html template: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-search-all/blob/f9b2a9c3328f35021a4744205d862c108f8f08eb/datasette_search_all/templates/index.html

The answer may lie in a plugin hook which returns a list of HTML fragments to be added to the page in a particular place.