feat(toolbar): support vertical dividers through `mat-divider`

[thw0rted]

Bug, feature request, or proposal:

Bug

What is the expected behavior?

It should be possible to display a divider in a mat-toolbar per the spec:

What is the current behavior?

Placing <mat-divider [vertical]="true"> creates a 0 x 1 pixel element.

What are the steps to reproduce?

In this StackBlitz, you can see the top toolbar has the divider but it's not visible, while the bottom toolbar manually styles the divider to show up correctly.

Which versions of Angular, Material, OS, TypeScript, browsers are affected?

Latest everything, as far as I can tell.

Is there anything else we should know?

In the StackBlitz, I have to guess at the pixel height of the divider because I can't find exactly how tall the line is supposed to be in the spec, even though they do call out the spacing between the line and the icons on either side of it. I think it's a blind spot in the spec, since neither the Structure nor the Toolbars section actually mentions the use of dividers to logically group controls.

[julianobrasil]

Another approach: https://stackblitz.com/edit/angular-material2-issue-ec8ueb

[thw0rted]

In your example, the spacing is wrong between the divider and the adjacent buttons. If I'm going to manually style stuff anyway, I don't think I'd want to add extra wrapping elements like the div you used. The point of the issue is that <mat-toolbar><button/><mat-divider/><button/></mat-toolbar> should lay out according to the spec without manual styling, and right now it does not.

[julianobrasil]

Oh, it was not supposed to be a solution, just an idea of a possible workaround. But you can achieve the spacing you desire (the one you used in the second toolbar) by adding fxLayoutGap="8px" to the wrapper div: https://stackblitz.com/edit/angular-material2-issue-ec8ueb

In theory, you could also use fxLayoutAlign="start stretch" fxLayoutGap="8px" directly in <mat-toolbar> as it is a flexbox. But it would need some additional styling because stretch would force mat-divider to take all of the height and align the inner flex items to the top.

I'm a huge fan of @angular/flex-layout 😄

[edit]: maybe @CaerusKaru can give you more appropriate directions

[CaerusKaru]

So I think the issue is two-fold: the styles for the elements inside the toolbar is wrong, and the style for the divider is wrong. It should be something like this (though the sibling CSS might be wrong, it's the intention):

.mat-toolbar > * + .mat-divider-vertical {
	margin-right: 16px;
}

.mat-toolbar > .mat-divider-vertical + * {
	margin-left: 24px;
}

.mat-toolbar > .mat-divider-vertical {
	margin-left: -1px;
}

Does this look right to you? I'm not going to comment on the internal sizing of the button in relation to the spec, mostly because it's not defined in that example. So while it looks like it should be smaller, since it's not defined, I think it's fine.

Edited: I keep forgetting that there's no previous sibling selector, so instead of the second and third styles, maybe just something like:

.mat-toolbar > .mat-divider-vertical + * {
	margin-right: 24px;
	margin-left: -1px;
}

[thw0rted]

I'm not a CSS expert but I'm not clear on why the sibling element style would be changed -- shouldn't the divider just contribute its own margin and trust the siblings to make up the rest? What if a toolbar element wants to set its own margin for whatever reason? It looks like the spec doesn't work that way, but that bothers me for some reason.

[CaerusKaru]

The facts remain that this is how the spec is defined. If someone wants to override the spec margins, they are free to do so. The important thing about sibling selectors is that you don't want errant margins showing up in case someone puts a divider first or last.

I'll put together a PR and hopefully the Material Design team can comment on it with the internal guidelines on this.

[jmls]

was this ever fixed ? I've just hit the same problem

[ShaneLillieRAD]

@devversion any chance this is going to be fixed? I'm hitting it as well.

[qortex]

Hitting it too

[lorenzocovarrubiasjr]

any update? @devversion

[jelbourn]

Closing this since we don't have any plans to implement this feature. The toolbar is in fact unfortunately named (based on the 2014-era Material Design spec), and doesn't actually correspond to the role="toolbar" interaction pattern, where having vertical dividers like this would make more sense. The <mat-toolbar> is really just meant to be a container for titles- it's not much more than a glorified div with a background color.