Is it good to use an accordion for dynamic generated content?
We have an application where we separate its content into two "categories", read-only information and read-write inputs. Each element will be categorized in one of them and will be displayed a little different.
The main problem here is that all content is dynamically generated by parsing a file that tells how to display anything on the screen. The user can navigate something like a directory tree, and each tree node may have any combination of informations and inputs. Some of them are quite large and we have no control about it, only about how we display those things.
We separated those elements with accordions by their category (read-only/read-write). As I mentioned before, there are some cases where a lot of elements need to be rendered, making the according larger than the screen forcing the user to scroll to reach the other accordion.
I was reading some questions here about good practices of accordion usage, like:
- When is it bad practice to use an accordion control?
- How to handle very long accordions?
- accordions vs tabs
And almost every answer stated that the content of an accordion should be entirely visible on screen, which makes total sense but is not what happens in our application in some cases.
So the question came because none addresses the best options for dynamic generated views as they seem to be not very common.
So here are some other questions that might help to address my issue and help finding the best solution:
- Is it ok to use accordions on this situation considering that not all cases will require scroll?
- If not, how could I manage to allow to either show one or both categories at the same time?*
- Would it be bad if the accordion had an internal scroll?
- Generally speaking, how to deal with potentially a lot of content?
* The later is the reason why tabs is not a great option for this case
OBS:
In case any one suggests a filter, I must say we already have a selection filter where the user can opt to see only one or both, but the semantic of it is entirely different. When the filter is active, it omits the elements as they never existed, affecting even the tree navigation, where the idea of the according was just to allow the user to collapse part of the content and easily see them again, it's much more specific and isolated.