The Idea Mill

Hey Guys,

great work on the table pager/sorter/filter!!

just wondering is there any plans to be able to load the unshown data (ie. data on the second page etc.. ) only on demand - hopefully making the initial page load of a large page quicker

refer http://dowdybrown.com/dbprod/rico2/examples/php/ex3.php for example

Cheers

Justin

I wrote this to make existing tables more usable. Ajax paging is doable, but it depends a lot on what back-end technology you’re using. If there is a big need for this I’m not opposed to taking a look at it.

The demo looks real nice, Daemach! Very cool! :o)

Cheers,
Chris

Thanks Chris

This is some really impressive stuff!

Also, just so anybody reading this is aware, jQuery 1.1.3 (not out yet, but will be soon) should be able to correctly handle cols and colgroups, so daemach’s patches are only necessary temporarily.

Thanks Aaron -

And for those reading this, the dev list has been very active and the bugs I patched have already been fixed. They just want to make sure it’s perfect before releasing so it shouldn’t be long now.

The table looks very impressive. I am wondering, does it / will it have the functionality so that a function can be called and the row ID passed to it when a table row is clicked? Can data in a cell be formatted as a link (most likely done in the data file I suppose)?

Thanks Lance

I wasn’t planning on adding any per-row functionality, but I’m willing to consider it if you can explain what you want to accomplish with this functionality. tableFilter just wraps your existing table, so if you wanted to add links, row event handlers or anything else you could do it outside tableFilter.

I am working on a plugin architecture now that will allow extending the base functionality. The first plugin is an aggregation function that will calculate sum/avg/min/max values on filtered numeric columns. If you have ideas for other functionality, let me know so I can work in the handlers.

Regarding row functionality. Function example. I’m currently doing a site where a table of data from a DB is created. Each row has an ID. Good to offer the choice of the row number or a column cell value that may be a key for something. When the user clicks on a row, a function is called and the ID from the row is passed to that function. In my case the ID is a DB primary key. At this point the coder can write anything in that supplied function. In this example, I’m using the passed key to open a new window that displays a lot more information about the listing that was selected in the table. The passed key is used in a DB query to populate the new window.

So, a lot can be done if you provide an empty function call on the click of a row and offer to pass either the row number or a given row cell value. Food for thought.

Thanks for the comments. Please note that tableFilter is just a “wrapper” for your table. You can easily use jQuery to add the functionality you’re looking for like this:

$(’#yourTable’).tableFilter().children(”tr”).bind(”click”,function(){ //this.id or $(this).attr(”id”) will give you the ID of the row. this.cells[n] or $(this).children(”td”) gives you all the cells in this row});

Hi,

Some columns might contains “special” types of datas, that you don’t sort by alphabetical order (eg MM-DD-YYYY). Would it be possible to set a class in the header to define how to sort it ?

Otherwise, I love the filter solution, very elegant ! For the column that provide a fixed set of options (eg the country one), would it be possible to have a select field instead of the free form one ?

Brilliant !

X+

Unfortunately, I have to do some magic to be able to sort by multiple columns, so I’m forced to sort everything alphabetically - even numbers and dates. I convert the data to a special format for sorting during the parsing stage.

By default, if a column has 6 unique values or less you get a drop-down, otherwise you get a text field. I’ve increased that to 10 unique values in the latest version, but you will be able to override that if you wish.

I’m glad you like it - more coming soon.

Hi,

Ok, got if for the drop-down, and good idea for the override.

I’m not understanding your code, but would it be possible to add some custom code between the “get the value from the cell” and “feed it to the sort machine” ?

Then sorting by number, date, source of the image… could just be about putting the right filter that converts between DD-MM-YYYY to YYYYMMDD for instance.

That’s one of the benefits of not seeing the code: everything looks so simple. The downside, of course, is that you look stupid with meaningless suggestions

X+

The code is pretty complex, though some of that is due to trial-and-error testing. I don’t have a programming background and I’m new to oop, so the code isn’t very elegant. It has improved somewhat in the latest version.

Parsing/sorting is handled using dataTypes. You could create another dataType definition which allows you to handle the source any way you need to.

The code is wonderful.

Could be nice to add a function to print friendly the content of the table

Cheers,
Oscar

When the first stable version will be published?

Well it’s stable right now as long as you’re using a pretty simple table. As soon as I can get to it is the real answer. This is a side project for me unfortunately, so I can’t devote as much time to it as I would like.

It might help if you guys could let me know how I make this work with my table. I’ve got an asp page. I’ve tried other tablefilters but found yours very appealing. For some reason not able to make it work with my table. What are the things I need to change to make it work with my table?

Take a look here for some basic tips: http://ideamill.synaptrixgroup.com/?page_id=16

Make sure you’re using the version of jquery that I included with the zip. Until 1.1.3 is released, it’s the only version that will work properly with this plugin.