Make the sidebar / agenda view an infinite scrolling timeline ListView (instead of the "current day until Sunday" limitation)
Presumably not terribly hard to implement, but not urgent, and the current behavior was hard to guess, so I'm filing this issue for reference, in case someone would like to work on it.
Current problem / symptoms
Barring sidebar bugs, the current scope / way the sidebar filters events (with the initial implementation @aplazas did in version 43) can be a bit confusing in practice, whether you are using it on the desktop or a portrait-oriented mobile phone. Currently, it seems that the scope of "events that do or do not get shown in the sidebar" is based on the combination of two things:
- The currently selected day in the mini calendar, AND
- The week of the selected day in the minicalendar (until Sunday only)
The fact that it shows only events "after that day, but only up to Sunday of that particular week" is weird and limiting. In practice, the list keeps shrinking in scope as you progress forward every day of the week, until you go past Sunday into Monday, and then the list gets filled up again with events of the next week.
In addition to the above, there are specific bugs that make the sidebar's contents selection & organization fall apart, currently: #898, #936, #968, #994 for instance.
From a broader perspective, it currently behaves in a way where no formfactor is well-served (the contents are redundant with the infinite month view in desktop mode, while not providing an infinite linear view in mobile phone mode). It seems @bertob also feels like we'd probably want different sidebar behavior on mobile (e.g. a full list below the mini calendar?) but then this probably means we need design clarification on this alongside with #1007 (see the "outstanding design question" below).
Proposed technical solution (mobile and desktop)
To fix at least the weird scope/filtering part, I would suggest that:
- The sidebar's backend gets reworked to have the same "infinite scrolling" architecture as the New Month View (#603) introduced in version 45
- It filters to "Current day + 7 days" by default (scrolling/swiping/keypressing further up/down would enlarge the scope as needed), without the limitation of the "end of the week" that the current implementation has. i.e. no week boundaries, only number-of-days limits for performance.
In this case here, it'd probably be much easier than #603 was, because it's the sidebar/agenda/schedule is completely linear and less things are shown at once.
Technically, to solve the "minimal" portion of the issue, you could address only the 2nd point above, but ideally, might as well address both points at the same time, as it might be nicer to have the infinitely scrollable view there too.
Outstanding design question (desktop)
Independently of the outcome of this ticket, there is the question of what to do with the sidebar on the wide desktop formfactors/breakpoints, because as it stands currently it is mostly just adding visual clutter.
The alternative I can see is, "Never show the sidebar in desktop mode; move its navigational widgets back into the main view's headerbar while in desktop mode" (i.e. treat it as a portrait-mobile-only view), but I don't know if that's the best solution.
It would be much better if, instead, it could provide information that doesn't simply duplicate a portion of what I already have in the Month (aka multi-week) or Week (aka multi-days / timetable) view... sure, if it was just me, I'd hide the sidebar entirely in desktop mode (like we probably should in some breakpoints like in #1007), but I suppose other people might have different needs than me on that front, so can we find a way to give it a particularly useful function on the desktop?