User Story
"As an editor, I frequently use the tools provided in the sidebar and would like it to remain open and available as I navigate the site".
As discussed in T246427, the collapsible sidebar should have the ability to maintain its collapsed/expanded state while navigating between pages. This task encompasses the work needed to implement that functionality for logged-in users only. The state will be tied to the users account, and will therefore persist across devices and loggged-in sessions as well.
Technical approach
- We need to create a new hidden user-preference that stores the sidebar open/collapsed state.
- Based on that preference, we conditionally set the checked attribute of the <input type="checkbox" class="vector-menu-checkbox vectorMenuCheckbox" aria-labelledby="{{label-id}}"> element in Menu.mustache in PHP.
- When a user clicks the menu icon, we intercept that click with JS that sends an AJAX request to the API endpoint that updates the user-preference.
The user preference should not be visible as an option in Special:Preferences, since it would be redundant to have the same functionality in two places. That makes this a JS only feature.
Open questions
How do we handle narrow widths? If the design of the sidebar overlaps the content at very narrow widths and takes up lots of space, like it does on Minerva, then keeping it open across page-views would be unexpected an undesireable. [[design needed]]
Acceptance criteria
- A feature flag exists that can be used to disable saves the database in the event the traffic is much higher than expected.
QA environment: Beta cluster
- While logged in, the sidebar retains state:
- while navigating between pages.
- across devices.
- after logging-out and logging back in again.
Sign off steps
- Make sure we've reached out to the DBA with the deployment plan and expected traffic to the preferences database table
QA Results - Beta
| AC | Status | Details |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ✅ | T255727#6304517 |
| 2 | ✅ | T255727#6304517 |
| 3 | ✅ | T255727#6304517 |
| 4 | ✅ | T255727#6304517 |
| 5 | ✅ | T255727#6304517 |
