Saving changes in a workspace-view; possibilities and user experience

I’m updating an Umbraco 13 to Umbraco 15 package. I have an interresting question about handling save actions in a workspace-view (the former Content Apps) on a document node. Both from a technical perspective (what is possible) and from a user experience perspective. Let me explain.

In Umbraco 13, a content app would not have the default content buttons (save, preview, save and publish):


As you can see, I did just put in a few save buttons. I was never fond of this solution, because the save buttons could go outside the screen on lower resolutions or if the user and group list was too long.

However, by default, in Umbraco 15, the default buttons are added:

So I have a choice to make how to handle this, depending on what is possible and what you would consider nice to have.

  1. I personally think the best option would be to remove the standard buttons and have a custom action. It’s in a place people expect it, and it’s always visible, even then the content of the workspace doesn’t fit in the screen. I’ve done thing on a custom workspace (not a workspace view), where you have complete control over the buttons. Like this:

However, in this case I know how to add buttons/actions and how to override the default buttons, but I don’t know how to remove any of the default buttons. If that even possible?

  1. Keep the old situation with the custom save buttons. That could work, but I think I would want to hide the default workspace footer and I haven’t figured out how to do that either. Also the same issue remains that the buttons could not be visible because they are outside the visible area.

  2. I could add an additionan button next to the default buttons. But from the perspective of a user, that would probably be confusing. But I know how to do this :stuck_out_tongue:

  3. I could hook into the save and save and publish events so the user uses the default buttons. But semantically, I feel this doesn’t make any sense. The content of the workspace view is NOT content but meta data.

Any thoughts?

Oh and if it’s possible to remove the default workspace footer, I could also add a custom footer in the workspace view itself. It would be kind of a fake footer, but the user wouldn’t see a difference. But it feels a bit like cheating the system.

And lastly, I could entirely ditch a save button and just save the actions the moment they are performed. It’s a lot more API calls, but the changes would be very persistent. Not sure what the implecations are in that case.