Open the left panel widget in the main shell area.

[YathindraNikshipth]

I would like to Open the left panel widget in the main shell area, rather than rendering the content in the sidebar when it is clicked.is there a way to achieve this?

[msujew]

Hey @YathindraNikshipth,

I don't think there's a recommended way of doing this. The issue is that the sidebar is essentially a tabbar for the side (left/right), like the tabbar for editors in the main area. Meaning that any widget that resides on that sidebar tabbar really lives in the sidebar.

You might be able to make this work by replacing the tabbar renderer with a custom renderer that allows you to contribute a command instead of a widget. This command would then open the respective widget in the main area.

[YathindraNikshipth]

Hi @msujew, thanks for your reply. Could you please share a reference for creating a custom tab bar rendering?

[YathindraNikshipth]

@msujew , I found there might be one more issue. When the widget is in the additional views, clicking on it causes the left panel container to expand, but it seems that the onActivationRequest is not being triggered. Do you think something else could be responsible for this behavior?

[msujew]

Unfortunately, no idea. You might need to debug the lumino code for this.

[YathindraNikshipth]

@msujewI tried using lifecycle hooks in Lumino other than onActivationRequest, such as onBeforeShow. It allowed me to prevent the left panel from expanding, which is great. However, I noticed something odd — even when I click on the Explorer or any other widget on left panel, the focus remains on my widget. As a result, my widget’s functionality still gets triggered, and a new widget is placed in the main panel.

Could this be a bug or a build issue, or am I possibly missing something?

Could you please provide any pointers or clues that might help me understand this better?

Thank u.

`

 protected async onActivateRequest(msg: Message): Promise<void> {
    super.onActivateRequest(msg);

    this.shell.leftPanelHandler.collapse();

    await this.attachCustomWidget();

 }

protected onBeforeShow(msg: Message): void {
    this.activate();
}

`

[msujew]

I'm not that deep into the Lumino stack, maybe @sdirix can help you along.

[sdirix]

I'm not familiar enough with Lumino myself to explain what is going wrong. In general it seems like a rather "hacky" approach.

A clean approach I have seen in adopter projects is to subclass the application shell, replacing the whole left/right panels with own implementations. There you can implement arbitrary behavior. This will work but it's non-trivial.

[YathindraNikshipth]

@msujew @sdirix Thanks for the inputs, will try working on that!