Implement 'Enabled' Property for Containers to Manage Clickable Child Components

Feature Requests
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working with multiple clickable Anvil components (such as buttons and links) and encountered a situation where I need to temporarily disable all of them once one is clicked—until the server call completes and avoiding double clicks (this means double call to the server!).

Currently, the most common approach seems to be manually maintaining a list of all clickable components and using a function to enable/disable them every time one is clicked.

Another option is iterating through child components within a ColumnPanel, FlowPanel, or RepeatingPanel to toggle their “enabled” property, but this requires manually handling each component, making the process more cumbersome.

Wouldn’t it be great if these containers had an “enabled” property? This would allow developers to disable or enable an entire group of child components at once, cascading down to applicable elements, instead of handling them one by one. It would simplify code and improve efficiency when managing interactive components tied to server calls.

Would the Anvil team consider implementing this feature in a future update?

Thank you! And looking forward to your insights!

1 Like
2

I like the idea. I have implemented this myself in several places, in the manner you describe.

Alas, in custom components I long ago had to rename properties, e.g., is_visible, to avoid conflict with existing Form property visible, and for internal consistency named others is_bold, is_enabled, etc. So it’s not just a matter of finding all components that have an enabled property. The property you’re looking for might have a different name.