Show dropdown of existing playlists when assigning it to a player

[DarkEyeDragon]

Currently the process of assigning a playlist is rather confusing.

Just having a text field to fill in the player name is not very intuitive.
This feature can be improved by having a dropdown of existing playlists.

[sagiadinos]

This is a search field with a combobox. Let me explain the underlying idea because my first thought was also to use a dropdown:

If you have to manage hundreds of playlists, a dropdown is not an option. That's the reason for this autocomplete combobox. As you said, the clear disadvantage is that you need to know your list already.

Honestly, I don't have a good idea how to solve this better. If you have a good solution for this, I'm open to it.

[DarkEyeDragon]

Hmm. I think you can kind of combine these. Have it be a dropdown (maybe lazy loading if you do have a lot of endpoints?). In that dropdown there is a search bar you can use to get more specific. That way its clear its a dropdown and search and not just a text box. Honestly i did get suggestions but i thought it was chrome's autocomplete because they looked quite similar.

Something like:

[TimoteusRuotsalainen]

Honestly i did get suggestions but i thought it was chrome's autocomplete because they looked quite similar.

The same thing confused me in the beginning. This is because using datalist uses the browser's styles to show the suggestions. Making the UI fixes would require replacing datalist with another way as they cannot be styled.

Right now on garlic-hub.com it works this way with firefox

• Click pen icon -> empty textbox appears
• Double click textbox -> dropdown appears
• Type something in the textbox to search dropdown

Semantically datalist is for autocompletion (I want playlist testing 1. I type te and datalist suggests the available playlists matching that). If the user doesn't know the name of the playlist yet then it causes confusion. This happens in two ways

1. No playlist created yet. User clicks pen icon. Empty texbox appears. User is stuck. Instead there should be some indication that "No playlists created yet" to guide the user that they need to create something first

2. User wants to assign playlist to player. In their mental model they don't think of it as a name. They think of having 5 objects on a table and want to select "that one". -> The user needs to be able to see available playlists and select based on clicking them (dropdown). If there are thousands then they need to be able to filter them based on criteria (I don't know if there are other ways to find the playlist in addition to the name that might be useful).

[sagiadinos]

Since last commits autocomplete for this fields are set to off and also a magnifying glass was added to make the fuction more clear.

1. No playlist created yet. User clicks pen icon. Empty texbox appears. User is stuck. Instead there should be some indication that "No playlists created yet" to guide the user that they need to create something first

Good idea.

Point 2.

The user needs to be able to see available playlists and select based on clicking them (dropdown). If there are thousands then they need to be able to filter them based on criteria (I don't know if there are other ways to find the playlist in addition to the name that might be useful).

Thousands of playlists. We have this issue in SmilControl since years.

What do you think about a preload of the last 10 created master /multizone playlists when field is empty?

[sagiadinos]

btw.: I just work on a reconstruction of this player context-menu / playlist assign unassign UX mess to make it more clearer.