Add Text view as 'dashboard' for Teams

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Feature request

Display the README.md in the Teamfolder in the Teams display. This allows including a wide range of content in the Team view, including everything from the Smart Picker.

Use case

As a team owner, I want to create a dashboard for my team members to see when they visit the team. I would want to show news/updates and key resources like our deck board for example.

@stediefan had the clever idea of 'just' using a Text view. Using a read-only Text view is doable performance-wise, in part as we optimize this heavily because it is also used as Folder view and in other places. And it can contain a lot of things, including Smart Picker items. Main downside is the single-column limitation of markdown (though a table can help with that).

Alternative

In theory, 'proper' dashboard could be build. A challenge is performance - if each widget loads the full underlying app, loading Teams gets super slow. This is why the Dashboard is very simple, and using the Dashboard widgets isn't really an option (we will want a much more interactive dashboard for Teams).

Potential approach could be the Smart Picker views as widgets - Talk is very quick with smart picker so maybe the perf there is good enough. But that is something to investigate.

From Louis:

whether we go for a custom dashboard or with the smart picker widgets, the performance concerns are the same. In both case we need to load part of the app that provide the widget, and the more there is, the heavier it is. As long as we do not display more than, let's say ~5 widgets in the dashboard or text file, then we should be fine.

So for now, we could use an embedded Text view, this is relatively easy to implement.

Related

• https://github.com/nextcloud/circles/issues/2663
• https://github.com/nextcloud/circles/pull/2742

Start by locating how the Teamfolder README.md and the existing read-only Text view are rendered in the Teams display. Investigate whether the embedded Text view can reuse Smart Picker content without loading full dashboard widgets. Done means the Team view displays the README.md as a read-only Text view while keeping performance acceptable.