This looks like a really great (clean and performant) JS library for interacting with data grid. I'll definitely remember to try it for my next side project.
A quick question: is there a way to make only some of the columns read-only in the grid? I looked through the doc [https://www.datagridxl.com/docs/setting-options] and it seems like user actions for columns are all (applied to every column) or none. If DataGridXL.js allows assigning read-only to a subset of columns, it'd be great to add that in the doc with an example.
Thanks for your hard work and especially for allowing others like me to try it for free!
Right now there is no such option, but it's definitely on the todos of 2020.
At this moment there are not many individual column options: the goal is to implement validation, formatting, read-only prop, etc. At this moment every column just displays raw values & everything's editable.
Thanks! I'd to write a proper "How It's Made" article about it in the future, but this is basically how it's done:
There is a blank DOM node "scrollArea" in front of all others that catches the native JS scroll event.
It then converts these scroll offsets (scrollTop and scrollLeft) to cell/viewport coordinates, by default 40px actual pixels per row/column.
So if the scrollArea has a scrollLeft of 40px and a scrollTop of 200px , an underlying DOM node that renders the cell values and column lines, will render at viewport position {x: 1, y: 5}.
The other important part that makes it snappy, is that a viewport of let's say 20 rows by 10 columns does not actually consist of 200 DOM nodes. Only columns are DOM nodes. The values inside a column are made to look like rows by CSS white-space property. So it only updates 10 DOM nodes when scrolling.
There is a bug that is caused directly by this whitespace hack. If you copy two lines of text and paste it to one cell, it displays as two cells and shifts the column content below the affected cell (if the affected cell is in the viewport)
Yes, it is possible to paste cells in excel and shift cells below in Excel. But here the cells are shifted if the corrupted cell is visible and shift back if it's not. Definitely a bug.
Ah I think I know what you mean now. I think you mean when you paste multi-line text inside the cell value editor! You're right, thanks for spotting it!
This does not happen when you paste when the editor is not open, am I correct?
Hi janci, just letting you know that the bug has been fixed. Thank you for spotting it!
The current solution that I came up with: replace \n with Return HTML-entity. Not sure if that is the best solution for you (or anybody else) but at least it prevents the unwanted shift of column contents.
CSS Scroll Snapping doesn’t make scroll in steps like the steps() timing functions, it just controls the points that the eventual scroll position will snap to.
CSS Scroll Snapping may have a place for image gallery sorts of widgets, but for broader layout matters I strongly recommend against it: it can work tolerably on mobile (though it’s not without problems), but on desktop it seriously messes with scrolling so that on many devices it’s almost entirely problems.
Using a real scrolling area and observing what effect scrolling has upon it is the only correct way of rendering things. Then you could draw the contents in various ways—canvas (handle interactivity yourself), another DOM element behind the scrolling area (ditto), or a fancily-done `position: sticky` element that fills the visible part of the scrollable area.
Just remember that there are serious accessibility concerns about any of these sorts of things. Approach any sort of clever lazy loading of content with extreme caution.
Css native's scroll-snap was not useful in my case, but in the end DGXL's custom scroll snap was one of the easiest parts of the product to build. It was one of the things I really wanted to get right.
Using a <table> tag would always be best for accessibility reasons, but it's not an option if you want to create a performant data table with thousands of rows. I am still using HTML, not Canvas, so it is accessible, but it needs improvements.
A great relief is that this is an input-component first of all, to be used in admin-areas. So there's no need for SEO-compatible HTML.
If a user is trying to scroll horizontally, we can get the delta and get the scroll direction. Find the column width of the next/prev column and update the scroll property. An implementation can look like:
True, scroll snap does have some performance benefits: fewer moments to update the DOM.
You're probably browsing the site on your phone, am I correct? I created scroll snap to replicate desktop version of Excel & G. Sheets behavior. I agree that it is not the best option for smaller viewports/touch. It's on my todo-list to introduce smooth-scrolling as well.
That’s an interesting case because it’s certainly a cool effect, but it’s kind of a cumbersome UX on mobile. It makes it hard to keep track of the columns as you scroll up and down. At a glance it seems like both the Google Sheets and Numbers iOS apps have smooth scrolling instead of snapping.
I initially created scroll snap to replicate desktop version of Excel & G. Sheets behavior. I agree that it is not the best option for smaller viewports/touch. It's on my todo-list to introduce smooth-scrolling as well, so that scrolling DGXL on touch will work closer to native apps.
Thanks for your suggestions. Sorting will be implemented very soon, perhaps this week.
I haven't really thought of filtering yet, but it's very likely that one day we'll introduce a filter-option. However, at this moment I cannot say when.
I have been looking for years for something to replace a custom rendered excel-like table I have.
The table has a complex layout:
- One fixed top row (date), two or three fixed columns on the left.
- Data are rendered horizontally; the number of rows does not change, but the number of columns can be in the hundreds.
Does your library support column-oriented data like this (you mention "60+" columns)? Does anyone know of any library which can easily render something like this? It's surprisingly hard to find something which lets you fix left hand columns and also render as many columns as I need.
The component actually did have fixed/frozen columns/rows in an earlier version, but I decided to leave out the feature for a v1. I plan to reintroduce it after more popular features have been implemented.
DGXL is able to handle hundreds of columns. The reason why it says 60+ specifically is that, according to browser-vendors like Mozilla, a DOM node should ideally not have more than 60 child nodes - for performance/memory reasons.
Yes. Let's say your data grid has 200 columns, but only 10 columns (DOM nodes) are rendered in the viewport. The other 190 columns are cached.
When scrolling horizontally, column nodes are appended/preprended on-the-fly. The old ones are only removed if the scrolling stops (until that time, column nodes that are outside the viewport are just made invisible by setting their opacity to 0).
If a user scrolls really fast without stopping in between, they might have 200 column nodes in the DOM. The DOM nodes are then only removed when scrolling stops.
Performance wise I haven't seen any problems with 200 columns or more.
Hi, DGXL does not support formulas at this time and I am not sure if I will implement the feature. I'll let it depend on popular demand.
There are a few products out there that implement formulas. A site like www.jspreadsheets.com mentions a few. Many of these products are not super-reliable or performant though (reason why I started building DGXL in the first place).
Maybe one day, but no promises. I did experiment with formulas in an earlier version, and it was promising, but there's a lot of things that need to be exactly right.
Also, I need to draw a line somewhere. I cannot turn the product into a spreadsheet, as I have chosen for performance as my main feature, which means it cannot do things like merged rows, merged columns, etc.
So if I'd implement formulas, people might expect more & more features, which I then cannot deliver...
(There are products out there that have basic formula support.)
Congrats on launching! This seems like a great product! I have seen use cases where something like this could come very in handy. I don't know if this is useful but I'd be worried about using this library because: the difficult to adhere to pricing scheme, the high cost for the level of market saturation, and lack of quality support.
Since you're building a library, not a tool, whenever I hire an engineer they'll automatically be using this tool and I'd need to remember to send you more money. The only other products that I have to do this with are either:
1. Monthly subscriptions that automatically charge me the correct amount of money.
2. GitLab which tracks how much I owe the developer and charges me the correct amount of money the next time around.
I'm concerned that I'll pay for this software, download a .js file, check it into my repo, hire a new developer, and completely forget they're using this product.
The biggest difference between this tool and my currently paid-for software is that it has no "check-in" period. I could very easily imagine a scenario in which I violate your license. Here are two:
1. I, as an engineer on a single project in a large company, buy your software and use it in a product. I move on to other stuff and get asked to write new features after a long time completely forgetting your software was paid-for. Me and another engineer start working on the project. We now have 2 devs.
2. Another engineer sees me building a cool project. They copy my frontend as a starter for another feature. We now have 2 devs in a multiproject license.
3. We have the correct multi project license for the correct number of devs but we want to hire some contractors for some cheap work. Hiring these contractors just became a lot more expensive.
As for the pricing, at 54,100 EUR ($62,444.87 USD) for a 50 person team, you're competing with a sizable chunk of an engineers salary. Depending on what part of the world you're in you can pay for 1 quarter to 1 years worth of an engineers time with this chunk of change. It seems you're setting yourself aside from the competition because of performance reasons. If that is the large differentiated factor I'd be thinking the following as an engineering manager:
1. Given the timeline (3 months to 1 year) can I build my own implementation of this product?
2. Given the timeline can I take an open source implementation that has more features, use it until there's a performance problem, then have one of my 10x engineers tweak it to make it perform better?
3. Can I find another paid-for version of this library that will be cheaper? In this very HN post there's another implementation of a similar product with a seemingly similar feature set that is substantially cheaper [0] that is also source available.
So, when I'm crunching the numbers, and have to choose to Build, Tweak, or Buy at a cheaper price, it's hard to justify this product. What makes it even harder to justify the product is the support limitations. The main reason to never choose build or tweak or "buy the cheaper one" is because it won't save you any time. Your support page makes it seem like, however, I'll have to put a lot of time and effort into bending over backwards to make a support request that fits your model. This makes the comparison:
1. Build XYZ and support it
2. Tweak XYZ and support it internally
3. Buy your software and get very non-specific support
Congratulations on launching, but consider distilling a part of the project and making it available under a free and open source license like MIT or Apache or BSD.
There are many commercial and open source products on the market, some more established and less expensive than your offering. From the business standpoint, it's easy to sell something like ag-grid because many developers have experience with its open source offering, so we know that we can find experienced people on the market to help if necessary. Your project doesn't benefit from that community and doesn't benefit from having a lower price point (it's comparable to what ag-grid charges)
I’m Robbert, the creator of DataGridXL.js.
DataGridXL is a free (and commercial) editable data table library written in ES6.
My goal is to develop the most performant & user-friendly spreadsheet-like data table out there:
- It has zero dependencies. You don’t need any framework to use DataGridXL.
- It is lightweight (~200kb) and easy to use. It does not even require messing with CSS.
- It has its own Virtual DOM implementation to prevent DOM errors.
- Developer friendly. Supports all modern web browsers
Please take a look at the performance demo (https://www.datagridxl.com/demos/one-million-cells) to see the difference with other data grids out there. And let us know if you have any suggestions.
Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments!