Links in element chips should open a flyout

[MoritzLost]

We got feedback from a couple of places that the current behaviour for element chips is unintuitive (currently testing the 5.7 beta). In particular for Assets fields, but also for Entries fields.

1. You upload an Asset through a field on an Entry and want to edit the Asset's fields:

2. You click on the asset title since it's formatted as a link, so you would expect that this is the default / recommended way to edit an asset.
3. Instead of opening a popup, the full asset edit page opens and you make your changes.
4. You hit Save and now you're in the Assets library. Where's the entry you were editing again? Alternatively, you hit CMD + S and stay on the asset edit page with no obvious way to return to your entry.

This is rarely what an editor wants in this scenario. Most commonly, you want to edit the related asset (or entry) and then continue editing the main entry. You can achieve this by double-clicking the element chip (but not on the title, kind of difficult for smaller chips without a preview image) or clicking on the context menu and then on Edit asset. But the link is the most easily accessible way to edit the asset, and the one most authors will choose by default.

I see two possible options to improve this:

1. Make the link open an element flyout by default. Opening the full asset edit mask could be moved to the context menu. So in effect, the behaviour of the link in the element chip and the Edit asset option in the context menu should be swapped. This is the best solution in my opinion.
2. Add a URL parameter with a return URL to edit pages. This way, an author could be redirected back to the entry they were editing after clicking on a link to a related asset / entry and saving. However, this doesn't help if you use shortcuts to save.

[SkermBE]

+1 to open the links in flyout. We had a few customers struggling with this too, had to explain they should avoid the blue links and just double click the chips.

[adrienne]

I think the text in chips should just not be hyperlinked, period, which would expose the underlying chip behavior (double-click to open in a flyout).

[mattbloomfield]

Agree with the above, links should be removed from the chip altogether. There is no reason an author would want to completely leave the page they are currently editing. Add a link icon or put the link in the dropdown menu.

[brandonkelly]

Just PR’d #17591 for Craft 5.9, which drops hyperlinks from chips and cards by default.