Basic catalog has no stepper / status-steps primitive
Summary
There's no primitive for multi-step progress / status ("here's where your order stands"), which is one of the most common things an agent renders after an action completes.
Current workaround
Building a status card against the basic catalog, the only option is a Column of Rows, each an Icon plus a Text, using icon name as a stand-in for step state — check for completed steps, arrowForward for the current one:
{ "id": "s1", "component": "Row", "children": ["s1-icon", "s1-text"] }What's lost
The state of each step exists only as an icon-name convention that the model doesn't express and no renderer can rely on. Consequently a renderer cannot:
- draw a connector rail or any stepper affordance, because it can't tell these rows are a sequence rather than an arbitrary list
- visually distinguish done / current / pending beyond whatever icon the author happened to pick
- expose step position ("step 3 of 4") to assistive technology
- render a compact variant, since there's no structure to compact
Every renderer that wants a real stepper has to reverse-engineer the author's icon choices.
Proposed shape
{
"id": "order-status",
"component": "Stepper",
"steps": [
{ "label": "Order received", "state": "done" },
{ "label": "Payment confirmed", "state": "done" },
{ "label": "Being prepared", "state": "current" },
{ "label": "Ready for pickup", "state": "pending" }
]
}with state as a closed enum: done | current | pending | failed.
Fallback story
Renderers without a stepper widget can fall back to exactly the icon + text column that's being hand-built today, so the degraded rendering is already proven in practice. The component is additive and optional — nothing existing changes.
Source: a2ui-project/a2ui