Sanity: Ability to select multiple references for easier population of arrays of references

[evenwestvang]

Great suggestion from @burkhartt in #491 to populate arrays of references with multiple selects in reference picker. Needs design study to see how much rework would be involved.

[dylanjharris]

In our use case there are a "crazy amount of items" (to quote @burkhartt in #491 ). Checkboxes/multiselect wouldn't feel right.

Feature request (which folds into this issue): ability to add references without having to close the dialog box.

CURRENTLY: click Add, then search, select, close dialog, click Add, search, select, close dialog, click Add....

AWESOME: click Add, then search, assign, search, assign, search, assign... close dialog.

[sjelfull]

@evenwestvang Have y'all done any design exploration on this yet? Care to share?

[dylanjharris]

Pinging @evenwestvang for any progress or design exploration on this? before trying to solve (temporarily) with custom input components.

Our use case is fairly unique but the desired feature is "simple": ability to add multiple references without closing the dialog box.

My content person is populating data (there's _a lot_ of data) and if a document has 20 references, she has to Add+Search+Close+Add+Search+Close...20 times.... and it's painful to watch... let alone do. We can save many click-hours with a graceful solution.

If no progress has been made, can you provide direction/example of custom input components involving the dialog/search? We can start from the Unicorn Slider example, this recipe snippet and the /components/src but any headstart would be warmly embraced ❤️

Of course, a custom input component for this may be more trouble than it's worth, especially if you guys have something coming down the pipeline.

Thanks!!

[evenwestvang]

Hi @dylanjharris – afraid we haven't had time to look at this yet. It's sitting in the box named better reference handling in a queue with some other items like create references in place and better search for references. I'm truly sorry though that the lack of a good solution here is wasting effort though.

I'll ping @mariuslundgard to see if he has any elegant ideas. The array component doesn't decompose well either and there may be quite some effort involved in making it do the things you want as well.

[dylanjharris]

Hi @evenwestvang - thank you for prompt response; we appreciate the transparency very much :)

After a quickish glance at core I got the impression which you are confirming: modification more trouble than it's worth at this time. The solution we're leaning towards now is just a simple frontend for populating references, which would help in other ways too including better visualization, stats & data, conditions and error handling, using Vue over React... so... maybe a blessing in disguise that we aren't modifying Sanity studio here... necessity the mother of invention and all that... and we get to build a bespoke UI in Vue alongside our core project! 👍

I'm still interested in any ideas Marius may suggest, time is the important factor here so any hacks/shortcuts/elegant solutions are still desirable. Thanks gang!