This looks lovely. As someone who has battled too often with jQuery DataTables - which can do everything under the sun but often feels like you're performing unanaesthetised emergency dentistry on yourself in the process - it would be terrific to have something more modern and flexible, even if it's not quite at feature parity. Here's hoping this might be it!
I like your DataTables review, as someone who has worked extensively with DataTables it is indeed very apt. However, the complexity exposed by DataTables is, at least partly IMHO, justified by the reality of how complex it is to do tables, especially in web app mode where "tables" are often dynamic entries that look nothing like tables whatsoever. In this latter scenario DataTables actually really do shine, at least once one has spent enough time to settle on a dev-routine that works.
I had felt the same way about Datatables, which is why I ended up writing Dynatable over the course of a couple years. Tried to take a somewhat different approach that felt more natural to use.
That looks really really nice. It's like it was built with javascript in mind rather than strVisualBasic i6.0 ;). I'm going to rip datatables out of my current project and put this in.
Have you considered (or implemented) col or row spans? A particular dataset I have to work with has multilevel column and row titles - so I've avoided using datatables for that.
That's the goal :) glad you like it! If there are any features you need please feel free to make a Github issue requesting them - I've got lots of free time to work on this right now.
One thing I noticed is that the search presented on http://glittershark.github.io/reactable/ does not seem to work quite right - if I search for "Shawnee" then "Shawness" then "Shawnee" again without reloading then the found entries seem to be duplicating freely so I end up with 6 (and counting) found versions of "Shawness". Good luck with maturing this library.
That's interesting you feel that way about DataTables. I was thinking about moving from slickgrid to datatables since slickgrid's author is no longer supporting the project. I was under the impression datatables might be easier to develop with compared to slickgrid.
If someone has used both slickgrid and datatables, could you recommend one or the other?
Great idea. I just started using React and was wondering if there was a repository of components so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel for just about everything. It might be handy to add tagging functionality so the components can be easily browsed through in the future.
Neat. I'm also building a general purpose grid for an app I'm building. From the demo it appears the entire table data set must be loaded for the pagination to work. I'm not sure how practical it is for real use.
I've been using Reactable in production for ~3 months now. I had the same thought when I saw that there was no server side pagination.
So, I put it to a test. My app has an audit log, 4 columns wide. I loaded in 30,000 rows into Reactable and it renders just fine...even on my Android device! Pretty slick.
This is pretty cool. Sorting by the datetime field in the demo sorts the strings alphabetically though. I'm not sure if that's an issue with the plugin or the demo, but it probably isn't the right behavior.
Why are some developers so enamored with tables and making ever more table-generation libraries. They are one of the worst ways to display information in a readable way. Outside of spreadsheet computing and source data, they have limited use. Tables should almost certainly never make it to an end-user UI.
I disagree. Even if you come up with novel ways, or use common visualizations (e.g. charts) to display tabular data - I'd still give the end user a 'table button' that lets them simply view the data in a table.
Because of the ubiquity of the spreadsheet, most users simply grok tables and in a pinch, want to see the data that way. If they can't, the first feature request you're going to hear is for an Excel export so they can work around your application - not in it.
I'm not saying it's right, I understand you can deliver more information per second in a way that aids cognition - but until users are accustomed to this - we need tables.
That being said, if you work in React.js - why not have a nice table library for React.js?
I guess you never worked on a ‘business’ application (as opposed to ‘social’ app, or a ‘game’)?
For example, let’s look at the screenshots below from a typical line-of-business app (AWS console). How do you think the UI should look like, without using tables?
I work on many business applications. I find developers make tables as a first recourse because they are easy and don't require thoughtful design of the most usable way to view and interact with data.
Edit: Also the example you showed me is definitely not tabular data, as each column cannot be tabulated to a sum or other aggregate. It would most likely be much more semantic to make it a list.
