Having Dynamic Tables/Grids/Views in the Content Explorer

Rhythmyx Technical Discussion
1

Good Afternoon

I am working on the application that is supposed to create templates for tables

The headers for that table are predefined, but the number of rows and the rows content should depend on the users’ selection/actions

What is the best solution for that situation, should I use EditLive? Is there a specific control/tool to create dynamic table within Percussion?

Someone once mentioned that there is one?

Please let me know if I was not clear and, once again thank you very much for your generous responses

2

If you’re trying to publish pages with an “interactive/dynamic” presentation of data in an HTML table or equivalent, that is client-side functionality.

Have a look at http://tablesorter.com/docs/

3

Chris

Thank you for replying. I understand there is a way to create client side tables. But I need to create an interactive table within Rhythmyx, so all contents would be stored in a database. With client side scripting I would have to use AJAXes.

So the Rhythmyx offers nothing to create interactive tables?

4

So you need some kind of elaborate tabular control in the Content Editor? Without knowing exactly what you need, I’d say it’s not implemented, OOB. You’d need a custom control for that.

5

Chris, I just managed to achieve what I wanted through Edit-Live but thank you very much for your efforts

6

There are three solutions to what you are trying to do,

  1. Use child tables on the content type. This works well if you have a small number of fixed columns. The user can freely add the data and order the rows. The data is tied to the content item itself. You then just create a special child table row template. Check out the documentation for this.

  2. Use a slot. A table row can be represented with a template, it can then be moved up and down freely. The row data would be its own content type, with its own workflow
    in this case. An extra step is required to create a row in this case, but this is good if the row data could be reformatted for use elsewhere, or it is coming from another content type.

  3. Use tables in Ephox. You could allow uses to freely create tables in ephox with the standard configuration, it is also possible to set up the configuration sot that a button inserts some fixed html. e.g. provide a class on a table, including some dummy text. This could be a table template. This mechanism is good if you want to provide flexibility, but the users may be able to break the formatting of the table, this also makes the table data more difficult to reuse. If you need more information on this you can check out the ephox online documentation, I will see if I can find something on this, I think it just invloves xml encoding the html to put it into an attribute in the configuration file.

I may be off the mark here on exactly what you are trying to achieve here but I hope this helps

7

Thank you very much for your answer, I am going to try the EPhox

8

Just a heads up when using large tables in ephox… make sure that the java heap size is way up there (say 800mb or so). We have been using it to load a 8,000 row table (with about 6 columns) and it take 10-15 minutes for ephox to do its thing (I assume tidy) before it submits and close to all that heap space (having less, it will fail without apparent warning to the end user unless they have the console up and can see the heap size error message).

9

Thank you for the advice jitendra

We are going to use 6 or 7 rows max

10

Gentleman, as I understand, in the EPhox I cannot specify the color change of the alternate rows. I have to do it on the client side

Am I correct?

And also, it looks like in the Ephox you cannot modify the borders