bug(CdkDragDrop): preview position is incorrect when inside of a popover using translate

[JeffMosaic]

Is this a regression?

• Yes, this behavior used to work in the previous version

The previous version in which this bug was not present was

No response

Description

Currently if you are using cdk drag with a preview attached to its parent, and the parent is inside of a popover type element that uses absolute positioning and translate transformation then the preview artifact appears in the wrong location.

This appears to be happening because the fixed position is unable to break out of its container due to a parent element having a transform property attached. Based on MDN this appears to be the expected behavior.

Switching to use the global cdkDragPreviewContainer position works around this issue but then breaks styling because the preview element is removed from the DOM structure controlling style.

Reproduction

StackBlitz link: https://stackblitz.com/edit/stackblitz-starters-1zhux8?file=src%2Fmain.ts
Steps to reproduce:

1. Click on one of the items
2. Start dragging

Expected Behavior

Preview element should be at the same position as the mouse pointer

Actual Behavior

Preview element is several pixels to the right and bottom on the cursor.

Environment

• Angular: ^17.2.0
• CDK/Material: ^17.3.4
• Browser(s): Chrome (maybe others)
• Operating System (e.g. Windows, macOS, Ubuntu): macOS (probably others)

[crisbeto]

I think that this is a duplicate of #28864. I have it my TODO to add a note for transform being problematic.

[JeffMosaic]

@crisbeto It does look like this is a duplicate of that issue. I agree that browser vendors have not given cdk a good way to solve this problem. Unfortunately to apply the workaround of attaching to body would result in breaking the cascade and requires the consumer of this API to do its own set of hacks to apply what would otherwise be inherited styles.

[crisbeto]

Would it be an option to put a container for the inside the list and then have the preview be projected into it? Something like

<div cdkDropList>
  <div style="position: fixed; top: 0; bottom: 0; left: 0; right: 0;" #previewContainer></div>
  <div cdkDrag [cdkDragPreviewContainer]="previewContainer"></div>
</div>

[JeffMosaic]

I appreciate the attempted workaround but all of the content in question is inside of a popover type element that positions itself using fixed and transform. Because of this and the way the spec is written for fixed positioning I do not think there is a straight-forward way to break the container out of being constrained.

From MDN

Fixed positioning is similar to absolute positioning, with the exception that the element's containing block is the initial containing block established by the viewport, unless any ancestor has transform, perspective, or filter property set to something other than none (see CSS Transforms Spec), which then causes that ancestor to take the place of the elements containing block

It is possible I am misunderstanding the provided workaround but how interpreted it was the following

<!-- does the fixed position + transform thing to position itself on screen -->
<my-popover-element>
    <!-- sets up some desired styles that are to be inherited -->
    <div cdkDropList>
        <!-- Unfortunately this is constrained to the bounds of my-popover-element because of its use of transform -->
        <div style="position: fixed; top: 0; bottom: 0; left: 0; right: 0;" #previewContainer></div>
        <div cdkDrag [cdkDragPreviewContainer]="previewContainer"></div>
    </div>
</my-popover-element>

The only options I see in this case are the following

1. Consumer of cdk uses global positioning (default option) and manually applies styles using a class or some other selector pattern
2. Consumer of cdk finds a parent that is outside of the transform element which in my case is the entire element that has styles I would like to inherit
3. cdkDrag's preview is updated to handle this case by walking the DOM tree finding if this set of rules applies and then offsetting its transform by the position of the problematic parent element.

I must admit none of these options sound great.

[crisbeto]

The example is more or less what I was imagining. I was also thinking if it wouldn't be possible to put the transform on something else that's not a parent of the preview container, but I realize that it might be tricky.

And yeah, it's unfortunate that this is the way they implemented the stacking context for fixed elements... I think the only viable workaround would be to create a native popover element dynamically (e.g. <dialog>), project the preview into it and then destroy that element.

[crisbeto]

I'll reopen this so we can try to use native popovers for the preview element.