Item actions as links

[dorianamouroux]

Hey!

First off, thanks for Backpex, we're using it for our admin and it's been really smooth.

One thing we've run into: item actions are always rendered as <button> with phx-click="item-action", so every click goes through the server. For simple navigation actions (e.g. "Show", "Edit", or custom links), that's a bit heavy.

We'd love to have an option for link-style item actions that render as real <a href="..."> instead of buttons.

Why we'd find it useful:

• Faster navigation: no LiveView round-trip for "just go to this URL".
• Better browser UX: Ctrl+click / Cmd+click to open in a new tab, right-click "Open in new tab", etc.

Rough idea:

Something like a type: :link (or similar) on the action config: where the action module provides a way to compute the URL (e.g. a path(socket, item) callback or the like) instead of (or in addition to) handle/3:

defmodule ExampleWeb.Live.Admin.BackpexItemActions.ViewAction do
  use BackpexWeb, :item_action, type: :link

  @impl Backpex.ItemAction
  def icon(assigns, _item) do
    ~H"""
    <Backpex.HTML.CoreComponents.icon
      name="hero-check-circle"
      class="h-5 w-5 cursor-pointer transition duration-75 hover:text-success hover:scale-110"
    />
    """
  end

  @impl Backpex.ItemAction
  def label(_assigns, _item), do: "Approve"

  @impl Backpex.ItemAction
  def href(socket, item, _data) do
     path = Router.get_path(socket, item.live_resource, Map.get(assigns, :params, %{}), :show, item)
  end
end

For those actions, the template would render an with the same icon/label/tooltip, and skip the phx-click="item-action" flow.

No strong opinion on the exact API — just wanted to float the idea and see what you think. Happy to help with a PR if you're open to it.

Cheers!

[Flo0807]

Hey, thanks for the suggestion. I've transferred this into an issue and opened a PR. See #1855

I named the callback link instead of href because it might be confusing as it's passed to the navigate attribute of the .link component, not href.

I guess we don't need a type setting as we can derive link actions from the definition of the link callback.