Today I got a call from a customer and we were looking over an older application that uses a lot of tables to display financial and other assorted data. The application is mostly meta-data driven with lots of layout formatting automatically driven through meta data rather than through explicit hand coded HTML layouts. One of the problems in this apps are tables that display a non-fixed amount of data. The users of this app don't want to use paging to see more data, but instead want to display overflow data using a scrollbar. Many of the forms are very densely populated, often with multiple data tables that display a few rows of data in the UI at the most. This sort of layout does not lend itself well to paging, but works much better with scrollable data. Unfortunately scrollable tables are not easily created. HTML Tables are mangy beasts as anybody who's done any sort of Web development knows. Tables are finicky when it comes to styling and layout, and they have many funky quirks, especially when it comes to scrolling both of the
table rows themselves or even the child columns. There's no built-in way to make tables scroll and to lock headers while you do, and while you can embed a
table (or anything really) into a scrolling div with something like this: <div style="position:relative; overflow: hidden; overflow-y: scroll; height: 200px; width: 400px;">
<table id="table" style="width: 100%" class="blackborder" >
<thead>
<tr class="gridheader">
<th>Column 1</th>
<th>Column 2</th>
<th>Column 3</th>
<th >Column 4</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Column 1 Content</td>
<td>Column 2 Content</td>
<td>Column 3 Content</td>
<td>Column 4 Content</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Column 1 Content</td>
<td>Column 2 Content</td>
<td>Column 3 Content</td>
<td>Column 4 Content</td>
</tr>
…
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
</div>
that won't give a very satisfying visual experience:
Both the header and body scroll which looks odd. You lose context as soon as the header scrolls off the top and when you reach the bottom of the list the bottom outline of the
table shows which also looks off. The the side bar shows all the way down the length of the
table yet another visual miscue. In a pinch this will work, but it's ugly.
What's out there?
Before we go further here you should know that there are a few capable grid plug-ins out there already. Among them:
Flexigrid (can work of any
table as well as with AJAX data)
jQuery Scrollable
Table Plug-in (feature similar to what I need but not quite)
jqGrid (mostly an Ajax Grid which is very powerful and works very well)
But in the end none of them fit the bill of what I needed in this situation. All of these require custom CSS and some of them are fairly complex to restyle. Others are AJAX only or work better with AJAX loaded data. However, I need to actually try (as much as possible) to maintain the original styling of the tables without requiring extensive re-styling.
Building the makeTableScrollable() Plug-in
To make a
table scrollable requires rearranging the
table a bit. In the plug-in I built I create two <div> tags and split the
table into two: one for the
table header and one for the
table body. The bottom <div> tag then contains only the
table's row data and can be scrolled while the header stays fixed. Using jQuery the basic idea is pretty simple: You create the divs, copy the original
table into the bottom, then clone the
table, clear all content append the <thead> section, into new
table and then copy that
table into the second header <div>. Easy as pie, right?
Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that as it's tricky to get the width of the
table right to account for the scrollbar (by adding a small column) and making sure the borders properly line up for the two tables. A lot of style settings have to be made to ensure the
table is a fixed size, to remove and reattach borders, to add extra space to allow for the scrollbar and so forth.
The end result of my plug-in is a
table with a scrollbar. Using the same
table I used earlier the result looks like this:
To create it, I use the following jQuery plug-in logic to select my
table and run the makeTableScrollable() plug-in against the selector:
$("#table").makeTableScrollable( { cssClass:"blackborder"} );
Without much further ado, here's the short code for the plug-in:
(function ($) {
$.fn.makeTableScrollable = function (options) {
return this.each(function () {
var $table = $(this);
var opt = {
// height of the
table
height: "250px",
// right padding added to support the scrollbar
rightPadding: "10px",
// cssclass used for the wrapper div
cssClass: ""
}
$.extend(opt, options);
var $thead = $table.find("thead");
var $ths = $thead.find("th");
var id = $table.attr("id");
var cssClass = $table.attr("class");
if (!id)
id = "_table_" + new Date().getMilliseconds().ToString();
$table.width("+=" + opt.rightPadding);
$table.css("border-width", 0);
// add a column to all rows of the
table
var first = true;
$table.find("tr").each(function () {
var row = $(this);
if (first) {
row.append($("<th>").width(opt.rightPadding));
first = false;
}
else
row.append($("<td>").width(opt.rightPadding));
});
// force full sizing on each of the th elemnts
$ths.each(function () {
var $th = $(this);
$th.css("width", $th.width());
});
// Create the
table wrapper div
var $tblDiv = $("<div>").css({ position: "relative",
overflow: "hidden",
overflowY: "scroll"
})
.addClass(opt.cssClass);
var width = $table.width();
$tblDiv.width(width).height(opt.height)
.attr("id", id + "_wrapper")
.css("border-top", "none");
// Insert before $tblDiv
$tblDiv.insertBefore($table);
// then move the
table into it
$table.appendTo($tblDiv);
// Clone the div for header
var $hdDiv = $tblDiv.clone();
$hdDiv.empty();
var width = $table.width();
$hdDiv.attr("style", "")
.css("border-bottom", "none")
.width(width)
.attr("id", id + "_wrapper_header");
// create a copy of the
table and remove all children
var $newTable = $($table).clone();
$newTable.empty()
.attr("id", $table.attr("id") + "_header");
$thead.appendTo($newTable);
$hdDiv.insertBefore($tblDiv);
$newTable.appendTo($hdDiv);
$table.css("border-width", 0);
});
}
})(jQuery);
Oh sweet spaghetti code :-)
The code starts out by dealing the parameters that can be passed in the options object map:
height
The height of the full table/structure. The height of the outside wrapper container. Defaults to 200px.
rightPadding
The padding that is added to the right of the
table to account for the scrollbar.
Creates a column of this width and injects it into the
table. If too small the rightmost
column might get truncated. if too large the empty column might show.
cssClass
The CSS class of the wrapping container that appears to wrap the
table. If you want a border
around your
table this class should probably provide it since the plug-in removes the
table
border.
The rest of the code is obtuse, but pretty straight forward. It starts by creating a new column in the
table to accommodate the width of the scrollbar and avoid clipping of text in the rightmost column. The width of the columns is explicitly set in the header elements to force the size of the
table to be fixed and to provide the same sizing when the THEAD section is moved to a new copied
table later. The
table wrapper div is created, formatted and the
table is moved into it. The new wrapper div is cloned for the header wrapper and configured. Finally the actual
table is cloned and cleared of all elements. The original
table's THEAD section is then moved into the new
table. At last the new
table is added to the header <div>, and the header <div> is inserted before the
table wrapper <div>.
I'm always amazed how easy jQuery makes it to do this sort of re-arranging, and given of what's happening the amount of code is rather small.
Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary
A word of warning: I make no guarantees about the code above. It's a first cut and I provided this here mainly to demonstrate the concepts of decomposing and reassembling an HTML layout :-) which jQuery makes so nice and easy.
I tested this component against the typical scenarios we plan on using it for which are tables that use a few well known styles (or no styling at all). I suspect if you have complex styling on your <table> tag that things might not go so well. If you plan on using this plug-in you might want to minimize your styling of the
table tag and defer any border formatting using the class passed in via the cssClass parameter, which ends up on the two wrapper div's that wrap the header and body rows.
There's also no explicit support for footers. I rarely if ever use footers (when not using paging that is), so I didn't feel the need to add footer support. However, if you need that it's not difficult to add - the logic is the same as adding the header.
The plug-in relies on a well-formatted
table that has THEAD and TBODY sections along with TH tags in the header. Note that ASP.NET WebForm DataGrids and GridViews by default do not generate well-formatted
table HTML. You can look at my Adding proper THEAD sections to a GridView post for more info on how to get a GridView to render properly.
The plug-in has no dependencies other than jQuery.
Even with the limitations in mind I hope this might be useful to some of you. I know I've already identified a number of places in my own existing applications where I will be plugging this in almost immediately.
Resources
Download Sample and Plug-in code
Latest version in the West Wind Web & AJAX Toolkit Repository
© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in jQuery HTML ASP.NET
