Bug Report: Chat does not support drag and drop into the composing textbox
Drag and drop does not work if I try to use it to move text into the composing textbox of Chat. This is the case regardless of whether the source is somewhere in the Chat window, another Family Tree window or an external application, and applies to the Chrome and Firefox browsers.
Sometimes I have some text in an external application, such as Notepad, which I want to include in a Chat. If I drag and drop the text into the Chat text box, nothing is added to the Chat. However, the selected text is removed from the Notepad window; that suggests to me that drag and drop is intended to work. Obviously, the workaround is to use Copy, then Paste.
I will normally be using Notepad in this way because of another issue with Chat: The text box for composing a chat has a limited maximum height (about four lines), which makes writing a message in Notepad much more convenient.
Can the drag and drop functionality implementation be completed in the standard fashion where Shift + Drag and Drop copies the text and plain Drag and Drop cuts the text and drops it? This works in most other parts of the Family Tree website.
Answers
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@JulianBrown38 I will forward this up to see if we can find an answer to this question. Thank you for assisting in making FamilySearch a better product for all.
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While working on this issue, I would love to see that text box made much bigger! I think the Chat is really hard to use.
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@JulianBrown38
Drag and drop within a browser into a text field is a feature that often works, but I've never seen anything documented in FamilySearch that gives any assurance that it is intended to work everywhere. It does work in most places in the FamilySearch website, but there are plenty of places it doesn't work. Besides the Chat example that was pointed out, you can't drop text onto any of the Memory details (title, description, etc.) text boxes, or the search field for Community, or the To Do List add item field on the home page. These are just a few random places I tried where it didn't work. I'm sure there are others that don't work, and there are certainly many where it does work.
One comment on your statement "However, the selected text is removed from the Notepad window; that suggests to me that drag and drop is intended to work." Drag and drop always involves two sides: the drag source (Notepad in this case) and the drop target (the FamilySearch website in a browser). The source gets notified that the text got dropped, so it can then do whatever it thinks is appropriate, but it doesn't know whether the drop was completely successful. So I wouldn't draw conclusions about how FamilySearch should react based on what Notepad does.Personally, I find dragging and dropping text to be inefficient and imprecise compared with copy and paste, so I never use it, but I understand that's my own preference. I'm certainly sympathetic to users who like to use drag and drop — it must be frustrating to find places where it doesn't work, and it's hard to know where it will or won't work except by trial and error. I'm sure that all the places in FamilySearch that don't currently support dropping text would have to be fixed individually. Is that an engineering priority? Are some places a higher priority than others? I don't know.
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