UX exploration: Add drag and drop to the Solution Explorer

[MangelMaxime]

Hello,

it is now possible to add support for drag and drop to TreeData created by extensions.

I managed to set it up using F# in Ionide.

On the following demo you can see me doing a drag and drop, which log the mime type of the item:

drag_and_drop_demo.mov

Now that I know drag and drop works, I was trying to think about which feature could benefit from it. However, I am not sure if we can implement any of them with a good UX.

Ability to move a file / reorder

I don't think we can provide a good UX for this feature because VSCode does support a drag and drop for re-ordering the files.

This means that when you drop the file the UI allow you to do it only on another item and not between 2 items

drag_drop_between_items_impossible.mov

For reference, here is how it is done in Rider:

drag_and_drop_between_items_rider.mov

Workaround: Decide that we always want to drop below the target item.

Allow to add file from outside

In theory, with we can support adding file from outside (OS system and/or other treeview).

The problem in term of UX, would be the same as for "Ability to move a file / reorder", we can't drop between items to have precise control of the destination.

Workaround: Decide that we always want to drop below the target item.

Can't prevent user from dragging an invalid item

What I mean by that is that, it seems like we can provide a visual feedback to indicate to the user that he can't drag an item or can't drop it there.

For example, we don't want the user to drag a project item inside of another project. Dragging a project can only be allowed to target a solution or folder inside a solution.

Workaround: We can show a notification in case of invalid destination.

---

Do you think any of the listed feature could make sense to implement with the current possibility of VSCode ?

Does it makes sense to ask VSCode teams to:

• Allow dragging between items?
• Prevent certain items to be dragged?
• Provide a visual feedback for invalid destination?

Personally, I think that the chances for having such API implemented is really low.

Are there any features that I didn't think about that we could implement with the current VSCode API?

[sjohnsonaz]

I would love to have Drag and Drop style file reordering! It's a really nice feature in Rider, that even Visual Studio doesn't support.