Is everyone happy with Component placement?

Anvil Q&A
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I’m talking about the imprecise nature of drag and drop of components onto a form.

I often have difficulty getting a component in the correct container or to the correct position within a container.

Especially when using multiple containers with small or no margins/padding.

There have been a number of feature requests:

but they do not seem to get much support (upvotes/likes) from users or indeed any traction with the Anvil Team

Hence the question?

I posted here in case the reason for the lack of interest is that most people lurk in the Q&A section and the Feature request section is maybe where ideas go to die!

If you would like to see an improvement in this area of the IDE then please add your voice (likes/upvotes) to the issue.

Otherwise I suspect the Anvil team will conclude that it is no big deal and ignore it.

My vote goes to an improved component tree dropdown, as it would appear to be the easiest for Anvil to implement.

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I’m mostly happy - it causes a minor issue every now and again, but that’s often a sign I need to rethink my layout.

There’s plenty else I’d like to see developed before this stuff gets anywhere near the top of the list, so I don’t vote for it!

1 Like
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I obviously agree with my own feature request, but here we see another problem: the only way to tell Anvil that one considers a feature request important is the same used to tell someone their post is cute: all you can do is Like it.

We all can Like as many posts as we want, a Like is worth very little. It can mean important, cute, thank you, me too, nothing…

I wish there were a less cheap way to convey the “this is important to me” message to Anvil.

If we all had a small finite number of Importants, for example 10 per user, each user could pick their most important 10 feature requests and Important them rather than (or beside) Like-ing them. One could Important 2, 3 or up to 10 times the same feature request.

When one feature request has been addressed or when your priorities change, you could remove some Importants from one feature request and assign them to another.

I just checked: I have Liked 250 feature requests. This means that my Likes are worth basically nothing. If only I could Important 10 or fewer of them, that would be a much stronger message to Anvil.

@owen.campbell has Liked 75 feature requests. Perhaps he is more diligent than me at Like-ing only what’s important to him, but, even if he had Liked only 5 or 10, his Likes would be rendered useless after being diluted by mine.

So, yeah, sadly enough my Likes to all those feature requests, just like the missing Like from @owen.campbell, are useless. Not the feature requests. I’m sure the Anvil team does read them and does listen to us. But Like-ing them or not is worthless.

5 Likes
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@stefano.menci excellent point.

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To the original question, component placement works for 90% of what I want to do, and the occasional annoyance when it doesn’t is fine. Any of the feature requests associated with it would be great to have, but not critical.

On liking feature requests, I always assume that the Anvil folks have their own ranking of feature requests based on their roadmap and estimates of how important something is. Likes might nudge requests up or down in that ranking slightly, but I don’t assume they’ll make huge jumps in the ranking because of likes.

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Periodic reminder (to others, as I’m sure you are aware) that there is at least one such way (as of a couple years ago, at least): to purchase an Anvil support contract and sponsor the feature.

1 Like
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Yes, directly contacting Anvil would convey the message, but you don’t know who else is pushing for the same feature, and it would get messy when your priorities change. I also think that feature requests that are discussed by multiple users on the forum are better than described in an email by a single user.

I would like to be able to see what feature requests other users consider most important and to transfer my precious few Importants from one feature to another.

Anvil knows what users pay and how much, so they can assign different weight to the Importants of different users. Their final ranking would be different from what’s publicly visible, but nobody expects for them to literally follow the forum ranking anyway.

Perhaps they do keep an eye on the number of Likes, but it’s obvious that my 251 Likes are worth exactly zero, for the simple reason that they are 251! The signal to noise ratio is close to zero.

If I had only 10 Importants I would spread them across 3-4 requests that I really consider important, instead of diluting them across the universe of feature requests.

I have no way to test this, but I guess the histogram with the number of Likes on each request today is close to a triangle, where the number of likes goes from 0 to 20-ish almost linearly. And I guess that the histogram with the number of Importants would show 95% of the features with 0 Importants and just a few steeply pointing up, reaching values much higher than 20-ish. I myself wouldn’t Important most of my own requests, simply because I created way more than 10, but I would only Important 2 or 3 of them, plus 2 or 3 made by other users, and some of them would have more than one Important.

2 Likes
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So, after 15 days and 74 views this only has 8 likes, and no comment from the Anvil team!

As the majority appear happy with component placement I’ll mark this thread as answered.