Share some wisdom? :)

TheSisb

I started working on my own grid because I have very specific needs and couldn't get it working in datatables.
Before I go any further with my grid I was wondering if you guys could share some words of wisdom and maybe things I should account for before I get too far.

Here's where I'm at so far:
http://www.thesisb.com/grid/

Features:
-fluid table
-table footer
-resizeable columns
-pagination
-sorting
-ajax (JSON) data source
-N columns freezing from both sides
-Handlebarsjs templates for table building and redraws
-Cell editing

Building a grid is a ton of work. It's impossible to foresee what issues may arise, and at this point I'm beginning to see them rolling in from all sides at once.

allan

The biggest challenge I've faced with DataTables with the table / cell widths. A cross browser nightmare and it almost never quite done what is needed. I think after 5 years of teaching I've got that core functionality of DataTables down to what I want it to be, but it doesn't support anything like resizable columns. I have a few ideas for how that might be done in DataTables (table-layout: fixed specifically), but if that is fundamental to your grid you might want to consider using divs for layout - but in turn that makes a fluid layout harder...

Allan

TheSisb

I can imagine. I'm using "box-sizing:border-box;" and floating my table cells to the left. Luckily I only need to support IE8 +. The box-sizing property is really helpful in making things align/be sized the way they should.

I thought about using divs, but they aren't semantically correct and I like the table markup structure. To get around N columns freezing on the left and right side, I split my table into three tables: leftTable, centerTable, rightTable; the pro is that I can absolutely position the left and right tables, the con is that the back-end data has to split up the data appropriately before converting it into the JSON.
I think I could do the calculations in the front-end, but to me it seems more like a back-end job.

Thanks for the wisdom, it made me think to check my table in other browsers (and noticed a few bugs).