[Feature] Make it possible to mark a button as disabled

[dclaux]

Description

In some scenarios, multiple actions might be presented in a card in an Outlook Actionable Message. As the user presses invokes these actions, the card might be refreshed and some of the actions that were previously available might not be available anymore.

Let's take the example of a card with two mutually exclusive actions, A and B (clicking A makes B unavailable, and the other way around):

• Initial card has buttons for both A and B
• User click A
• The card gets refreshed
• In that refreshed card, the button for A is replaced by a label reading "Done!"
• But what about B? There are two things that can be done:
  • Either B is still there. When the user clicks it, they get an error that B cannot be done anymore because A was done before
  • Or B is gone

Describe the solution you'd like

In some cases, neither of the above two solutions are great, especially if B is visually represented as a button. What should really happen is:

• B is still there, but is disabled (both visually and functionally)

This allows the user to understand that clicking on A lead to not being able to click on B anymore, using a known UI pattern.

Design

The goal of this feature is to make it possible to craft cards in which actions are permanently disabled. If an action is marked as disabled, there is no way to re-enable it by simply interacting with the card on the client.

We will add a boolean isEnabled property to all actions. isEnabled defaults to true. When set to false, the card element associated with the action is functionally and visually disabled:

• Buttons have a disabled appearance and do not respond to clicks/taps/keyboard invocation. That includes action buttons for the card's actions property, for an ActionSet's actions as well as for the inlineAction of a TextInput.
• Images or other elements with a disabled selectAction look and behave as if they had no selectAction.

Visuals for disabled buttons (just like for enabled buttons) are up to each SDK and platform. Developers should be able to customize the visuals of disabled buttons using native styling; there will not be any HostConfig changes for this.

Downlevel clients which do not understand the isEnabled property will simply ignore it which mean the actions will remain enabled. It is up to the card author to deal with this constraint and craft their card so as to provide an acceptable user experience.

Implementation Platforms

• JS
• .NET WPF
• Android
• iOS
• UWP

[shalinijoshi19]

@RebeccaAnne FYI and also to weigh in.

[dclaux]

This feature has been approved for inclusion in a future version of AC (likely 1.4). The chosen design is to introduce an isEnabled property. This issue will be updated with a more complete spec to cover the details of how isEnabled will work.

[paulcam206]

this has been implemented (see schema docs)