We have a lot of data sent to Elasticsearch that contains diagnostic information like ids that refer to database records, error reports, etc. A lot of these are not simple numbers so being able to highlight them for copy and paste into another location would be extremely helpful. Yet you go out of your way to disable this in Grafana. I can get around this by using Dev Tools to inspect the DOM and copy the value from there but that is a bit of a pain. This is the only web page I’ve come across that doesn’t allow the copying of text. What’s up with that?
We don’t go out of our way to disable copying - that would be weird. The reason is that when you are looking at a dashboard, the panels are dragable which is the same action as copying with a mouse. You’ll notice if you edit/view a panel then the text is selectable. The issue is here: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/2083
If you have time to find a solution for it, I think lots of people would appreciate it.
From my point of view, I see no reason why, in the normal context of using a dashboard, you should have the need to drag panels around. Every other type of modification to a panel is through a menu selection. Why leave the ability to drag things around when you’re viewing data? I love a lot of things about Grafana but this “feature” is truly annoying.
We experimented with a build mode but it never felt right. If you have a great UX solution, we’d love to hear it. These sorts of changes are very important to us. We are currently implementing a new grid system for dashboards (will be in the next version of Grafana) and will be revisiting this topic in the coming weeks.
I too think this is a very odd and annoying behaviour.
I have a table displaying data. The table can be moved by drag as you suggest, but not when you are hovering over the text. The cursor changes from arrow to the text bar. This prevents the movement of the panel, but still doesn’t allow the text to be selected. I think the simplest solution would be to pass down mouse actions if your top level panel doesn’t use them (which I thought was default behaviour) i.e. return the passed in mouse event object from your handler. Failing that use the same check that the mouse cursor is using (or check the state of the mouse cursor) and allow text selection.
You’ll be happy to hear that this is fixed in Grafana 5.0. You can see that the issue linked to above was closed a few months ago: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/2083#issuecomment-353060600