Explore alternative layout mechanism

[dpsthree]

As of today, all renderers utilize angular-gridster2. This was a great choice for getting started, but for real use, we may need more control over layout.

Some key challenges that I would like to address include:

• Excess white space. The current implementation uses fixed sizes for the grid cells and any overflow is hidden. Furthermore, this typically creates unwanted vertical space.
• Good, default, responsive layouts. It would be nice if a developer could say something as simple as, "I would like a vertically stacked list of controls" or "Layout the controls horizontal and scroll as needed for responsiveness.
• Transparent cells and forms. It should be possible to drop an Incrudable Form on any kind of background and the gridster elements (or other proposed solution) should not be visible. Only the controls should be seen by a user.
• Groupable sections - It would be nice in a future version of the library if a subset of controls can be grouped together visually (grouping data is a related but different item). It should be possible to add a visual grouping element to the form
• Overrideable cell and form styling - The devs should be able to customize the appearance of containers, groupable sections, and forms. My initial thoughts are that this should be made possible by supply some cleverly crafted scss mixins.

It may be possible to achieve the above goals with a more refined usage of gridster, but we may have better look by taking another shopping trip.

[kylecordes]

Is the idea to keep shipping with a single great layout mechanism in the box? Or to make it pluggable and thus make it the “user’s problem”?

[dpsthree]

@kylecordes The ideal end state would be a pluggable solution that ships with a great default. In order to “ship” today I would be OK starting with a single great layout mechanism. The defaults that we currently have with Gridster are not really meeting my minimum requirements, thus this item.