Universal Editor: Add (Plus) button to allow display of single-entry lists

Hello, this is an enhancement request that the support team suggested I log here instead.

I have an AEM Headless project with a decoupled Next.js frontend and components instrumented for the UE. Many components are containers that expect a certain structure of subcomponents. UE does not provide for instrumentation of such “precomposed” composite components, so all this inner substructure has to be tediously built out by authors. This is time-consuming and brings a learning curve: the authors don’t initially intuitively know which subcomponents are expected to go inside which container-type parent components.

Obviously, we instrument the containers to only allow the right type of child components to be added, and in many cases a parent component only allows one specific type of child. Which is obvious to developers but not to authors, and here’s where the current behaviour of the Add (Plus) button gets in the way. If there is only one possible type of component that can be added, the Add button just adds it without showing. This gets the job done but doesn’t help the authors learn the structure of the components. We are really missing a control for this behaviour, ideally in the user profile preferences: whether or not to display single-entry options under the Add button. By knowing what will be added at the expense of an extra click, users will learn what goes inside each composite component. 

Being able to add precomposed container-type components with all inner structure of subcomponents built out would help a lot too. It’s much easier to remove optional elements from it then to add each tediously and wait for the remote FE project to return the refreshed preview into the UE…

[I wanted to tag this post “Universal Editor” but no such tag is available — would be a good idea to add it]