So Petra found a very specifc and exciting option in agGrid: suppressMakeColumnVisibleAfterUnGroup after a bit of troubleshooting with the name (they misspelled it in their own documentation) she was able to determine that it solves this issue for us:

We are considering the following approach, that would make it the default behavior:
#1715

But I now that might be too blunt, for existing grids that are relying on setting the initial grouped column to hidden, and using this behavior, to have only the currently grouped column hidden.

Perhaps we should go ahead and add the option Don suggests, but making it do everything it needs to do would be a lot more work that what we have in the current PR.

Currently, if the user hides a column, then groups and ungroups that field, not only does the column appear visible but it also remains "Available" and does not show as "Displayed" on the column chooser.

@petradish - could you take a few minutes to update this ticket with the current status? Unclear from the history here what (if anything) PR #1715 changed w.r.t. auto-hiding of groupBy columns.

@petradish - could you take a few minutes to update this ticket with the current status? Unclear from the history here what (if anything) PR #1715 changed w.r.t. auto-hiding of groupBy columns.

sure thing! will check up on this ticket later today

PR #1715 set the agOption suppressMakeColumnVisibleAfterUnGroup: true on our DataView component to support grouping on hidden columns. Without it, ungrouping in ag-grid has the default behavior of making the column visible (and for DataView, we want all but the 1 synthetic column hidden).

For Grid there is no default hiding of columns when a grid is grouped by them. From my understanding, this ticket would like that feature to be added (perhaps as some hideWhenGrouped config on column). The question is, if we do support that, what should happen when that column is ungrouped? Should it remain hidden, become visible, or return to its hidden/visible state before it became a grouped column)

Another orthogonal issue/bug that was discovered relating to ag-grid's default behavior of making a column visible after it is ungrouped, is that our ColChooser does not correctly reflect the visible state of an ungrouped column if it had been hidden while grouped. I could create a new ticket for that bug, or address this in the PR that would eventually resolve this ticket.

Bumping to v48 as this came up in client QA - change to groupBy causing outgoing groupBy col to show unexpectedly, including unsupported state within the column chooser

We have another usage of suppressMakeColumnVisibleAfterUnGroup: true in the TODO app, to support hidden column grouping. Noting that here so that we clean it up if we do something better here. Its the ugliest option name I have ever seen in 30 years of working with GUI toolkits.

Just hit this annoying bug again in a client app, FYI

looking now!

Upvoting this ticket since I just ran into the same issue of our Hoist Grid col-visibility state being out of sync with AG-Grid's and leading to some unexpected behavior.