Retool Component Wishlist

Figured I'd make another wishlist of components that I wished were Native to Retool!

  • Image carousel - I would love to have an image carousel in-app. @sophie made this using a couple components here - How to Make an Image Carousel and Selector Component in Retool but I think it makes sense to be a native Retool component.

  • Masonry or Tile View - also another one we've recreated using a list view and hidden containers in the rentalcalculator.app - this view would be great for a lot of internal tool use cases!

  • Timeline view - Currently using the timeline component and/or the calendar component to show time based GUIs - would love a view more similar to notion's timeline component for showing time based items

  • Native Kanban Component - Similar to a board view where one can drag and drop objects and change attributes for CRM style applications.

  • Vertical line divider - Would love a vertical divider component to split sections. Currently the horizontal component works pretty well - would love to divide things vertically as well.

  • Interactive Key Value Map - Currently the Key Value map is pretty limited - I would live to interact with this component in a similar way to a table. It also breaks easily.

  • A Better List view component - Love the list view component, but think it has more potential - I find due to some of the clunkiness with the component I opt more often for the table component when realistically a list view component would make more sense. For ex: I would love to have sort capabilities similar to a table, drag and drop capabilities to change order. less padding for the entire component. ( I often have containers inside the list view and make the list view component transparent so it looks more like a list of cards than the current list view aesthetic)

  • PDF / Report Component - Don't have a perfect vision for this, but definitely think that it's something Retool can improve on. Currently Retool doesn't have great ways of making Reports natively in Retool - which I think is a process that is common in internal tools - we outlined the current capabilities here - Creating PDFs in Retool however I don't think these are the most user-friendly. Would love a "Report Mode" where it was easy to quickly make reports and pdfs of a selected data set. Retool is already halfway there with the pretty dashboards people can make.

  • Server- side paginated Multiselect and Select component - I would like a cleaner way to use these compenents with arrays of 20,000 + items. Currently I have a lot of difficulty searching when the data set is too large.

  • Filter Component for tables - I find that the filter functionality of cards goes under used by end users. If there was a toggle to enable something like the filter in Google Admin, where you select the thing you want to filter, it prompts you on data type, and then it becomes a filter "tag" end users would use filter a lot more

    Select column here

Screen Shot 2022-06-08 at 10.25.24 AM apply filter here

Screen Shot 2022-06-08 at 10.26.08 AM Filter becomes a tag above table that can quickly be deleted

Think that's it :slight_smile:

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Thanks for this comprehensive list, Joey! Will be sure to share with our team and add it to our internal tracker.

Was thinking of writing another post but this list tackles my concern a bit so gonna tag along here.

I'd like to add on the Multiselect and Select Component - option to keep search term/result while making a selection. Currently, when I choose an item on the list, the search term is reset and my search result is gone. I have to type the same search key n times just to get all the items I need.

Would be good if we can have this. Thanks

4 Likes

Great list Joey!

Let me especially second the improved ListView, your ideas are excellent and I have fallen back on Table many times when I really wanted the ListView.

For the PDF/Report component, one good example to follow is Microsoft Access' Reports capability. In Access you can make Tables, Forms, Queries, Code modules and Reports. Reports is Retool's only missing piece. Whether you build a drag/drop builder like Access (preferred!) or at least let us do handlebars/html in the mean time, something is needed!

The other most wanted item I would add to the list is a dramatically improved Reordable component. It should look less like a multiline text box without needing html skinning, it should have drag handles, be resettable to original order, programmatically updatable and contain a full set of events (dragged, dragStart, dragEnd, etc)

I would them use the reorderable component for simple lists and the postulated List View for reordering cards and more complex UIs.

6 Likes

+1 all of these, any update on these?

Checking on updates! :slight_smile:

We'll be replying with updates soon! Thank you all for your patience :pray:

This is a great list - I too wish the list control had a few more features. I find it is one of the most useful controls, but the limitations have me usually trying to find work arounds for stuff I feel like it should do. A couple more things I wish it offered:

  • Ability to switch from vertical list to grid layout - just let me specify the Flex control options would be nice so I can get a nice grid or horizontal list VS vertical.
  • Option for built in pagination like the table control

Also - another component I just wanted to use was the "Tags" component - it makes a nice little tags pill layout - but is totally non-functional. I really would love it if this component would offer onclick handlers for each tag pill, so you could for instance use it to filter your results by that tag.

Lastly, and I know I have seen this mentioned before: a collapsible siderail component - literally could be the same as the collapsible container but it collapses horizontally VS vertically and pushes stuff over VS down. I have found a work-around for this using click events, temp state and changing the width of my main container up to 100% by repurposing the show shadows CSS flag on it - which mostly works ok - but is kinda a hack.

2 Likes

Hi everyone!

Synced with the manager of our our core app building product and have some general updates.

We’re always adding to our component library (e.g. we shipped Breadcrumbs recently), and revamping existing components (e.g. our new Calendar component). So, we love requests like these, keep them coming!

Of what’s mentioned in this post, we’re going to be working on some of the bigger layout patterns like grids / tiles, lists, and likely key/value in the first half of the year :slight_smile: We haven’t started that work yet, but it’s a top priority and we’ll update this thread when we do.

Over the next couple weeks, our team will look at some of these smaller requests, too. Hopefully some we can knock out quickly! We’re also currently working on a big revamp of Tables in Retool, so feel free to join us in the #beta channel of our Power Users Slack if you'd like to test out this new table.

3 Likes

Thanks for the update Victoria! :slight_smile:

We're particularly interested in a card carousel component. Supporting short lists, ~2-8 ish cards where each card has some basic info - basically a way to visualize tables with only a few rows, taking advantage of horizontal spacing instead of vertical spacing. Something a la:

Welcome to the Forum @alden ,

I took this as a challenge and created an app that shows how to do this:

Hopefully that gets you where you need to go.

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Hey @JoeyKarczewski!
I know this is an older post, but a friend and co-worker of mine @TRF and myself did figure out a way to create responsive masonry layouts utilizing Retool's Custom Component using the Bootstrap library, HTML & CSS :magic_wand:
You can view his post here, and if you haven't found a solution for implementing a masonry layout we would be happy to show you how we utilized this solution!
Hope this at least helps with that portion of your suggestions!

Made an updated post about this with code examples here

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