drawer_rail 0.5.0

A collapsible, themeable side navigation drawer with a full-width panel and a narrow icon rail: search, sections, badges, expandable groups and flyouts.

Changelog

0.5.0

A bug-hunting release: everything below except the new API was found by reading the widget back against what its own comments claimed it did, then written up as a failing test first. The suite grew from 36 tests to 52.

Hover, when the pointer keeps moving

• Fix: sweeping from one group to the next stranded the first one open. All groups shared a single timer, so entering the second group cancelled the pending close of the one just left — and it then stayed open for good, since the bookkeeping had already moved on. Each group now keeps its own timer.
• Fix: in the collapsed rail, the same bug meant the next flyout never opened at all — the shared timer resolved to the wrong action. Rail flyouts now swap cleanly, and only one is ever open at a time.
• Fix: a rail flyout opened straight over the buttons below it, so the group underneath an open one could not be reached — fatal with groupTrigger: hover, where the pointer has to travel through the overlay to get anywhere. Flyouts now open beside the rail, and mirror correctly with position: right.
• Fix: a drawer torn down mid-peek left hoverPeeking stuck on, so a controller outliving the drawer reported the wrong railCollapsed from then on. DrawerRail now hands the controller back clean.
• Fix: a group with no children opened an empty flyout. It now opens nothing.

Layout

• Fix: the content slid sideways for the whole collapse/expand animation. The OverflowBox meant to lay the content out at its target width inherited the animating container's tight minWidth as a floor, so it never did — the content was laid out at the animating width and centred instead. It is now anchored against the edge that does not move, so the rail is revealed rather than squeezed: no re-wrapping, no mid-animation ellipsis, no drift. With position: right the anchor flips with it.

Search

• Fix: searching a group's name found nothing. Only children were matched, so Reports came back empty unless a child happened to carry the word too. A group that matches now offers all of its children.
• Fix: a query left running behind the rail silently filtered the panel the next time it opened, with nothing on screen to explain the missing entries. Pinning the drawer collapsed now clears the search. A hover peek or auto-hide is transient and deliberately leaves what you typed alone.

Motion and accessibility

• Fix: pressedScale was captured once in initState, so changing it — or a theme change that changed it — went unnoticed for the life of the card.
• Fix: reduced motion did not reach the press micro-scale. Items went on shrinking under the pointer even with MediaQuery.disableAnimations set. A scale is movement however short its duration, so DrawerRailTheme.resolve now forces pressedScale to 1 under reduced motion rather than merely running it faster.
• Add DrawerRailTheme.pressAnimationDuration and the matching parameter on AnimatedPressCard (default 140ms), so the press micro-scale is as tunable as every other animation.

Housekeeping

• Add DrawerRailController.resetHoverState(): clears hoverPeeking and hoverHidden without touching the pinned collapsed. DrawerRail calls it on teardown; it is a no-op on an already-disposed controller, so teardown order stays the caller's to choose.
• Add DrawerRailLabels.copyWith, and value equality on DrawerRailLabels and DrawerBadge — they can now be asserted on directly in tests.
• Fix: per-group state grew without bound. Menu controllers and timers for groups that no longer exist are now dropped when entries changes.
• Fix: a dartdoc link pointed at NovaDrawer, a type that does not exist — a leftover from an old rename.
• README: a section of its own for search, the pub.dev badge now that the package is published, and the reduce-motion and flyout behavior documented as it now actually is.

0.4.0

Hover: opening and closing

• Add DrawerRailTheme.hoverAdaptive(), a one-line preset that makes the drawer pointer-driven: rail and groups switch to hover, railAutoCollapse turns on, and linkTrigger deliberately stays on click. Pass base: to layer it over your own styling.
• Add DrawerRailTheme.railAutoCollapse (default false) and hoverAutoCollapseDelay (default 450ms). With railTrigger: hover, leaving the drawer now also closes one the user left expanded, making hover symmetric. Off by default because it takes away a panel someone pinned open.
• Add DrawerRailController.hoverHidden and setHoverHidden, the mirror of hoverPeeking. Like a peek, an auto-collapse never writes collapsed, so the state you persist still survives a passing mouse.
• Fix: a group opened by hover now closes when the panel itself closes, instead of still sitting open the next time the drawer is revealed.
• Fix: an explicit collapse/expand now also cancels an auto-hide in flight, not just a peek.

Cursors

• Add DrawerRailTheme.clickableCursor (default SystemMouseCursors.click) and inertCursor (default SystemMouseCursors.basic), plus matching parameters on AnimatedPressCard. Every clickable surface now states its cursor rather than inheriting one, and the drawer's own chrome states the arrow — so the pointer reliably reverts when it leaves an item.

Motion

• Add groupAnimationCurve, hoverAnimationDuration and hoverAnimationCurve.
• Fix: the group unfold used a linear height tween, which read as mechanical next to the eased width animation. It and the chevron rotation now follow groupAnimationCurve.
• Fix: the item hover shadow/tint appeared and vanished in a single frame. It now fades over hoverAnimationDuration.
• Fix: hovering a selected item replaced its pill color with the drawer surface. An already-opaque background is now kept as the shadow's backing surface, so the pill keeps its color and just lifts.
• Items now spring back from a press with a slight overshoot instead of easing flatly back to size.
• Honour MediaQuery.disableAnimations: every animation duration collapses to zero when the platform asks for reduced motion. Hover delays are kept — they gate an interaction, not a motion effect. DrawerRailTheme.resolve takes a new optional reduceMotion flag.

Other

• Add DrawerRailTheme.copyWith.
• The hover-shadow regression helper moved back to matching AnimatedContainer, because the card genuinely renders one now. The 0.3.0 note below was correct at the time and is simply no longer true.
• Rewrite the README: every theme field now documents what it turns on and what visibly moves, and the example app got live switches for Open on hover and Close on exit.

0.3.0

• Add DrawerActivationMode (click / hover) and three theme fields that choose how each interaction is triggered on web and desktop: DrawerRailTheme.railTrigger (pointer peeks the collapsed rail open), groupTrigger (pointer opens groups inline and as rail flyouts) and linkTrigger (pointer activates a link after a dwell). All default to click, so existing behavior is unchanged.
• Add hoverOpenDelay, hoverCloseDelay and hoverSelectDelay to tune the hover timings. The close delay is what lets the pointer travel from a rail button to its flyout without the menu snapping shut.
• Add DrawerRailController.hoverPeeking, railCollapsed and setGroupExpanded. A hover peek widens the rail without changing collapsed, so the state you persist survives a passing mouse; read railCollapsed for the width actually on screen.
• Hover never replaces tap: every item stays clickable in every mode, so touch platforms — where hover events never fire — are unaffected.
• Fix two hover regression tests that were passing vacuously: the helper looked for an AnimatedContainer under AnimatedPressCard, which renders a plain Container, so it never inspected anything.

0.2.1

• Fix visual bug where hover effect was applied as an overlay affecting foreground legibility. Hover now strictly alters the background color using InkWell, keeping text and icons at 100% opacity.

0.2.0

• Add DrawerRailTheme.hoverEffect (DrawerHoverEffect.shadow / .highlight / .none) so the item hover feedback can be switched or turned off, plus hoverHighlightColor for the highlight variant.
• Fix the murky/cloudy look of the hover shadow: in shadow mode an opaque surface is now painted behind the card, so the shadow reads as a lift instead of a colored haze bleeding through transparent items.

0.1.0

Initial release.

• DrawerRail: collapsible side navigation drawer with an expanded panel and a narrow icon rail.
• Built-in diacritic-insensitive search, uppercase section headers, selected pill, text/count badges, inline-expandable groups and collapsed flyout menus.
• DrawerRailController (ChangeNotifier) for collapse, selection and group state — no external state-management dependency.
• DrawerRailLabels for localizing the built-in chrome.
• Customizable header and footer slots via builders.
• Fully customizable DrawerRailTheme, falling back to the ambient ColorScheme:
  • Sizing/spacing: expandedWidth, railWidth, iconSize, railIconSize, railItemHeight, borderRadius, itemBorderRadius, contentPadding, itemPadding, groupChildIndent.
  • Text styles: labelTextStyle, selectedLabelTextStyle, sectionTextStyle, badgeTextStyle, plus sectionUppercase.
  • Chrome icons: collapseIcon, expandIcon, searchIcon, clearSearchIcon, groupTrailingIcon.
  • Motion: animationDuration, animationCurve, groupAnimationDuration, pressedScale.
  • Layout: DrawerRailPosition (left / right).
• DrawerRail.searchDecoration to fully override the search field, and DrawerRail.showFooterDivider.