Layouts need a build in include/exclude function
I have a panel tree structure which is very hard to make in Rive. The reason for this is that Rive does not support solos for layouts and it also cannot include/exclude items from the layout engine without using a very convoluted timeline structure which becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as the tree complexity grows.
Imagine overlapping panels. In a UI menu structure, there are only 3 panels. The panels each display different content depending which menu item is selected. The new layout show/hide function works for this, but it does not remove a panel from the layout engine. This causes the panels to be placed side by side instead of on top of each other. It is possible to use absolute positions to get around this, but that disables the automatic placement, the whole point of the layout engine.
A great feature would be to have a key "participate in layout". Yes, constraints can do something like that, but it is not intuitive to use, and requires a lot of manual work to handle all the different menu states, something which is not feasible.
There is a "Hide" button that I noticed recently that you're able to key. This is a property on layouts that essentially toggles the visibility and the participation in the layout.
Although that works, making sub menus using that features quickly becomes error prone and very hard to maintain.
Agreed. I'd like the Solo functionality on layouts. That would ease the construction of more complex hierarchies