Support contributions to the shell layout #10981
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msujew
added
shell
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This looks good to me. It increases the extensibility of the platform and reduces the need for overrides, which is definitely positive. One concern I have - and this applies as much to the existing toolbar as to this PR - is that the shell's list of expected areas is static (top, bottom, left, right, main), but now some widgets are outside of those (toolbar - at the top, but not in the top panel). To really achieve the flexibility this introduces, we'd need to have the shell be more dynamic in its expectations so that it can handle widget interactions (adding, removing) from more areas.
| @@ -581,13 +585,24 @@ export class ApplicationShell extends Widget { | |||
| const panelForSideAreas = new SplitPanel({ layout: leftRightSplitLayout }); | |||
| panelForSideAreas.id = 'theia-left-right-split-panel'; | |||
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| const contributedTopPanels = this.getContributedPanels('top'); | |||
| const contributedTopStretch = contributedTopPanels.map(() => 0); | |||
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I don't think it matters much, but a more explicit way to do this would be New Array(contributedTopPanels.length).fill(0). Possibly there's some saving on not running a .map that may reserve space for (pointers to) the panels?
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I'll maybe come back to this later. For now, I don't really have an approach on how to fix the underlying issue, i.e. the rigid shell structure. |
What it does
Allows downstream apps to contribute widgets to the layout without extending the
ApplicationShellitself. I had the idea while reviewing #10731, where overriding theApplicationShellto contribute a new widget to the layout seemed a bit overengineered.So far it only supports adding panels under the top panel, although we could extend this for all areas of the app. Although, I'm not totally sure that's even useful.
Aside from the toolbar, I can imagine that we reuse this API to also add support for banners in the future like in VSCode:
How to test
The test case for the introduced
ShellLayoutContributionis the toolbar. Simply confirm that it behaves as usual.Review checklist
Reminder for reviewers