Feature Request: Column State Management (Width, Order, and Visibility) for FluentDataGrid

[mikermnv]

Hi team!

First of all, thank you for the amazing work on the Fluent UI Blazor library. FluentDataGrid is a great component, and I would like to propose a feature enhancement: built-in column state management.

Currently, users can resize columns using sizers, but there is no out-of-the-box way to easily save and restore this layout. It would be fantastic to have a mechanism to both get (export) and set (import) the current state of the columns.

Here are the key use cases I have in mind:

1. Column Width & Resizing Persistence
   - The Goal: When a user resizes columns to their liking, the application should be able to capture these widths and save them (e.g., to local storage or a database). When the user returns to the page, the grid should restore those exact dimensions.
   - Proposed API idea: A way to bind or react to column width changes, and a property/method to apply a predefined set of widths upon rendering.

2. Column Reordering
   - The Goal: Allow users to change the visual sequence of columns (that part is already done) with the ability to programmatically retrieve the new order and apply it back on the next session.

3. Column Visibility
   - The Goal: It would be incredibly useful to have a built-in or easily configurable setting/menu where users can choose which columns to display or hide from the available pool of columns.

Why this would be awesome
Managing grid states manually (by wrapping columns in conditional logic or trying to manipulate the DOM/CSS variables for widths) introduces a lot of boilerplate code. Having native support for exporting/importing column configurations (Width, Order, Visibility) would make FluentDataGrid incredibly flexible for dashboard-heavy applications.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this or see if anyone has found an elegant workaround for this in the v5 version!

Thank you for your time and consideration!

[vnbaaij]

Hi,

Thanks for the compliments and for the proposal!

I think this is something we can work on for a post-V5 release timeframe. There are a couple of thing we should think about more before we can start building this though:

• The settings for width, order and visibility can most probably be read at the earliest in OnAfterRender(Async). This might lead to the grid being rendered with the default (code provided) settings for width etc first and then have the stored settings applied after that. It might lead to perceived flashes/flickering in the display of the grid.
• How do we make sure we do not pollute the users local storage with saved settings?
• How do we notify users that certain columns are hidden?

Probably not a complete list here yet, but these are just some questions and remarks that popped up for me. Let's use this space to brainstorm on this more!