dialog: add support for temporarily minimizing/restoring with state retained

[recursionbane]

Actual Behavior:

• What is the issue? * Need a way to temporarily disappear an md-dialog; hide() destroys the dialog and resolves the promise from show()
• What is the expected behavior? A minimize() or disappear() function to temporarily hide the md-dialog

AngularJS Versions: *

• AngularJS Version: v1.6.5
• AngularJS Material Version: v1.1.5

Additional Information:

• Browser Type: * Any supported
• Browser Version: * Any supported
• OS: * Any supported

I'm trying to allow "minimizing" (or simply hiding) an md-dialog temporarily so users can interact with the rest of the app and return to the hidden md-dialog to continue interaction at a later time.

I have attempted using ng-hide on the md-dialog, but it doesn't return control back to the SPA, and setting focusOnOpen to false seems to have no effect.

The reason I need this? My SPA is a set of md-cards that open up md-dialogs, all of which contain enough content to require opening full-screen. The md-cards interact with each other conceptually, and there are many workflows that require ping-ponging between the md-cards.

I would like to avoid nesting the contents of my entire app within each md-dialog to allow users to exploit "multiple" overlaid md-dialogs.

My plan is to simply hide the dialog and keep it in memory rather than try to store state and restore it.
Is there a recommended way to approach this?

[CuReSoft]

+1

[umanda]

I had a same requirement, what I have done was used little jquery

$scop.minimize = function () {
            $('.md-dialog-container').hide();
            $('md-backdrop').hide();
        };

$scop.maximize = function () {
            $('.md-dialog-container').show();
            $('md-backdrop').show();
        };

This is indeed not a perfect solution, but this is works for me. But I am looking for a very prominent solution.

[norkunas]

Use prerendered dialogs https://material.angularjs.org/latest/api/service/$mdDialog#pre-rendered-dialogs

[recursionbane]

@norkunas Thanks! How can I store and retrieve all state (not just variables, but GUI element states and user-entered text) within the manually-linked scope of the instantiated prerendered dialog? Should I create a hashmap of scopes for every nested dialog at the app level?

[recursionbane]

@umanda This looks very promising! Thanks.

[Splaktar]

Thank you for submitting this issue and explaining your use case. However, this falls outside of the Material Design spec and what we can support in this library.