Share menu cleanup – we caught a case of feature-itis 🤧

[jancborchardt]

Done

• Android
• iOS
• Desktop
• Web UI

Looking at the share link menu: #11844 (comment)

We are again shoveling stuff into places during a cycle and at the end things look crowded. Right now the menu items are (yes in this order, should be done through my commit):

Current state

• 📋 Copy link (outside of menu cause most important)

●●●

• ✏ Allow editing
• 🙈 Hide download
• 🔒 Password protect
• ⏱ Set expiration date
• 🏷 Edit link label (only necessary as soon as multiple links exist, if at all)
• 🗒 Note to recipient
• 🗑️ Delete share link
• ➕ Add another link (separated via border-top cause it has nothing to do with the current link)

Yes those are 9 options just for a link. Strange, right?

---

Evaluation

Now let’s look at the importance of these entries. Correct me if I’m wrong:

• 📋 Copy link (outside of menu cause most important)

●●●

• ✏ Allow editing: Important toggle!
• 🙈 Hide download: Complete custom edgecase
• 🔒 Password protect: We had it for long, but is it used often?
• ⏱ Set expiration date: Same here: We had it for long, but is it used often?
• 🏷 Edit link label: This has got to be most useless thing of them all. See below for more info
• 🗒 Note to recipient: Custom thing, is it used?
• 🗑️ Delete share link: Pretty essential of course
• ➕ Add another link: Useful for people who want multiple links, but not essential.

---

Improvement

So basically we could make it a 2-step popover with:

• 📋 Copy link (outside of menu cause most important)

●●●

• ✏ View / Edit / Upload only: Show as toggle buttons in one row with icons.
• ⚙️ Additional settings: Expands on click to reveal all these additional things
• 🗑️ Delete share link: Pretty essential of course
• ➕ Add another link: Useful for people who want multiple links, but not essential.

---

For the user share menu:

• 📋 Can edit (outside of menu cause most important)

●●●

• 🎉 Can reshare
• ⚙️ Additional settings: Expands on click to reveal all these additional things
  • Can create (only for folder shares)
  • Can change (only for folder shares)
  • Can delete (only for folder shares)
  • Set expiration date
  • Note to recipient
• 🗑️ Unshare: Pretty essential of course

Now that’s a cleanup! 🧹

And people who really need the advanced stuff can reach it quickly. Also:

• Any settings where the defaults were changed (like a password set) would be shown directly in the list already
• Any settings which are enforced by the admin (like expiration date) would also be shown directly in the list

---

Addition on link "label"

Special section on the link label/name editing: We need to understand that manually naming links is just really unnecessary work no person should need to do.

We need to have sensible automatic link naming like for example:

• Share link (read only)
• Share link (editable)
• Share link (editable, expires in 5 days)
• Share link (editable, password-protected)

Because there are only so many setups you can have for the link. We already have a share note too, we could simply display the first sentence of that in a second row, if it’s there? That would already give a lot of context.

What do you think @nextcloud/designers @nextcloud/sharing

[nextcloud-bot]

GitMate.io thinks possibly related issues are #10230 (Feature/shares overview), #10467 (Reword share comment feature), #10750 ([Feature Request] Search in link-shared directories), #2836 (Error while link sharing), and #11898 (Feature/read only public share).

[linucksrox]

I just came here to the issue tracker to complain about this, but I'm glad to see you already recognize the craziness here! Most importantly, as you already said, the link to copy should not be hidden in the overflow menu. I just had a user ask why share link wasn't working, because it's not intuitive to have to click extra times to hunt for the link you're trying to create.

Also I have a couple complaints about the expiration date. Most importantly, After opening the date picker and then clicking the left arrow to go back one month, the share link menu disappears and you lose context of what was happening, also making me unsure if the date I'm going to pick will actually save. The other small issue is the date format: I live in the US and we do dates backwards, month-day-year. This should ideally be a regional setting, or something, and I need this to show month-day-year instead of day-month-year because right now I set November 8, 2018 but it looks to us like August 11, 2018 if I didn't know any better.

[linucksrox]

Another comment: Do we need an option in the menu to "Delete Share Link" when we can simply uncheck the "Enable" box to make it go away? Why are there two different ways of doing the same thing?

[rullzer]

@linucksrox on 15 copy is no longer in the menu. And there is no checkbox anymore.

[linucksrox]

@rullzer Ok, that makes more sense. I'll wait to see how things look after the next major upgrade.

[jancborchardt]

I just came here to the issue tracker to complain about this, but I'm glad to see you already recognize the craziness here!

@linucksrox Hahaha! Thank you, that made me smile! :)

Also I have a couple complaints about the expiration date. Most importantly, After opening the date picker and then clicking the left arrow to go back one month, the share link menu disappears and you lose context of what was happening, also making me unsure if the date I'm going to pick will actually save. The other small issue is the date format: I live in the US and we do dates backwards, month-day-year. This should ideally be a regional setting, or something, and I need this to show month-day-year instead of day-month-year because right now I set November 8, 2018 but it looks to us like August 11, 2018 if I didn't know any better.

@linucksrox Could you open separate issues for each of these pieces of feedback? Thanks a lot! :)