Edit content mode (select mode): Ellipsis menu button in list view is empty

[andrewserong]

Description

Following #65204, blocks in the list view still show an ellipsis menu, and it's clickable, however the menu is empty.

In this case, where the menu will be empty, shall we skip the ellipsis menu button from rendering?

Step-by-step reproduction instructions

1. Open the site editor
2. At the top left, click the pointer icon and switch from Design mode to Edit mode (formerly known as Select mode)
3. Open the list view, and see that there is still an ellipsis menu button for each item in the list view

Screenshots, screen recording, code snippet

Environment info

• Gutenberg trunk

Please confirm that you have searched existing issues in the repo.

• Yes

Please confirm that you have tested with all plugins deactivated except Gutenberg.

• Yes

[youknowriad]

I think this is most likely fixed by #65485

[andrewserong]

Just re-tested on trunk, and it's close now, but we still expose the block settings menu in some circumstances. Mostly it's hidden (e.g. with headings and paragraphs), however Button blocks still appear to show the settings menu:

2024-09-25.10.45.22.mp4

[richtabor]

Confirmed, this is still happening for the button block at least. I'm not following the conditions why this block is treated differently, even from List Item block.

[youknowriad]

Can't reproduce this at the moment. I see a "duplicate" menu item for buttons.

[andrewserong]

Can't reproduce this at the moment. I see a "duplicate" menu item for buttons.

I just re-tested and I think it's largely gone now. Since we now allow duplication, I think that's largely hidden the issue as we only rarely see a situation where the settings menu is empty. This is pretty edge-casey, but I can now reproduce the issue if I lock a button block (i.e. as might be the case within a pattern), and then switch to content only mode, as in that case Duplicate will not be available:

2024-10-24.13.50.12.mp4

IMO this makes it much lower priority to fix, as in most cases users likely won't encounter this? Still, it could be good to polish it at some point.

[youknowriad]

My guess is that it's not really fixable with how our extensibility APIs work. We have slots that inject menu elements to these dropdown, and I believe there's no way to know whether there will be something rendered on these slots or not without actually opening the block settings menu.

That said, we could be "more conservative" and say: just hide the whole dropdown if "content only" or something regardless of whether there are fills or not.

[draganescu]

just hide the whole dropdown if "content only"

I think we just expanded the list of available optopns in this dropdown, right? Maybe the dropdown should say it's empty if it's empty with some disabled state ... although that never fares well 😄