Duplicate value suppression

zkarj

Hi. Amazing job you've done with this. I'm using it as part of the WP-Table reloaded plugin for WordPress.

What I'd like to be able to do - which I don't think is currently supported - is to suppress cells where the cell above has the same value.

I think it should be a column property. By example, the following table...

A 1 2
B 1 7
B 2 5
C 4 9

...with such a property set on the first column would become...

A 1 2
B 1 7
. 2 5
C 4 9

This would logically have to be applied according to the current sort, filter and viewport on the table.

Possible?

zkarj

Oops. Edited to try and make blank space where the second "B" was (i.e. ignore the dot). I hope you get my drift.

allan

You could do this by making us of fnDrawCallback to delete cell information that isn't needed on a post draw. One thing that would make it difficult in DataTables itself is paging - for example the duplicates might span multiple pages, but you would want the top row in the page to display the value - even if logically it's the sixth (or whatever) repeating time for that value. fnDrawCallback would make this much easier.

I've done something similar - although not identical for this example: http://datatables.net/examples/advanced_init/row_grouping.html - it is checking duplicates and then inserting a new row to group things together. It might provide a useful starting point.

Allan

zkarj

I would imagine that the process would be to store the cell value for each column in a 'previous row' array and then make a comparison to this before filling out a cell in the current row.

I have an 818 row table with 431 unique values in the first column, the rest being blank indicating repetition. I used to split the whole thing up manually (alphabetic ranges on that first column) but thought I could save myself a lot of hassle by using the pagination provided (to WP-Table reloaded) by DataTables. The trouble, of course, comes when the first row of a page is blank in that first column.

For now I shall just populate the blank cells with duplicate info. Not ideal but correct. I'm setting up a completely new version of my site and trying to avoid any customisation at a code level where possible.

It would be useful if this could be built in to DataTables. To my mind, this is a fairly common practice in print.

zkarj

Aha! I solved the problem, though not with DataTables.

The raw data is in a Google Spreadsheet. I just created a new sheet which automatically copies the names down into the blank cells. Then I created another one that grabs from the 'has-blanks' sheet except on every 50th row, when it grabs from the 'no-blanks' sheet. I've then set paging to 50 and not user changeable. Bingo!