
Show HN: Reactable – fast, flexible, and simple data tables in React - glittershark
https://github.com/glittershark/reactable
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bshimmin
This looks lovely. As someone who has battled too often with jQuery DataTables
- which can do everything under the sun but often feels like you're performing
unanaesthetised emergency dentistry on yourself in the process - it would be
terrific to have something more modern and flexible, even if it's not quite at
feature parity. Here's hoping this might be it!

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JangoSteve
I had felt the same way about Datatables, which is why I ended up writing
Dynatable over the course of a couple years. Tried to take a somewhat
different approach that felt more natural to use.

[http://www.dynatable.com](http://www.dynatable.com)

~~~
jsmeaton
That looks really really nice. It's like it was built with javascript in mind
rather than strVisualBasic i6.0 ;). I'm going to rip datatables out of my
current project and put this in.

Have you considered (or implemented) col or row spans? A particular dataset I
have to work with has multilevel column and row titles - so I've avoided using
datatables for that.

~~~
JangoSteve
Thanks! It has been considered, and is planned, just hasn't been implemented
yet. There's a lot more discussion about it here:
[https://github.com/alfajango/jquery-
dynatable/issues/30](https://github.com/alfajango/jquery-dynatable/issues/30)

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shaohua
Added to [http://www.reactjsx.com/](http://www.reactjsx.com/), where you can
search reusable React components

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nogridbag
Great idea. I just started using React and was wondering if there was a
repository of components so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel for just about
everything. It might be handy to add tagging functionality so the components
can be easily browsed through in the future.

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kasperset
Nice to see this but there are few other related projects based on React(Not
100% React) that I know of: [https://github.com/bgerm/react-table-sorter-
demo](https://github.com/bgerm/react-table-sorter-demo)
[https://github.com/josebalius/ngReactGrid](https://github.com/josebalius/ngReactGrid)

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nogridbag
Neat. I'm also building a general purpose grid for an app I'm building. From
the demo it appears the entire table data set must be loaded for the
pagination to work. I'm not sure how practical it is for real use.

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leesalminen
I've been using Reactable in production for ~3 months now. I had the same
thought when I saw that there was no server side pagination.

So, I put it to a test. My app has an audit log, 4 columns wide. I loaded in
30,000 rows into Reactable and it renders just fine...even on my Android
device! Pretty slick.

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awhitty
This is pretty cool. Sorting by the datetime field in the demo sorts the
strings alphabetically though. I'm not sure if that's an issue with the plugin
or the demo, but it probably isn't the right behavior.

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dengar007
Hey cool! I've been working on something similar.
[http://dynamictyped.github.io/Griddle/](http://dynamictyped.github.io/Griddle/)

I'm glad to see more components coming to React :)

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carterehsmith
Nice! You may want to add it to some of the React component list, like this
one someone else mentioned:
[http://www.reactjsx.com/](http://www.reactjsx.com/)

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dengar007
Added it :) Didn't even realize that existed until seeing this thread.

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lotsofmangos
You have a bit of a namespace collision -
[http://www.reactable.com/](http://www.reactable.com/)

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hawleyal
Why are some developers so enamored with tables and making ever more table-
generation libraries. They are one of the worst ways to display information in
a readable way. Outside of spreadsheet computing and source data, they have
limited use. Tables should almost certainly never make it to an end-user UI.

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jrmiii
I disagree. Even if you come up with novel ways, or use common visualizations
(e.g. charts) to display tabular data - I'd still give the end user a 'table
button' that lets them simply view the data in a table.

Because of the ubiquity of the spreadsheet, most users simply grok tables and
in a pinch, want to see the data that way. If they can't, the first feature
request you're going to hear is for an Excel export so they can work around
your application - not in it.

I'm not saying it's right, I understand you can deliver more information per
second in a way that aids cognition - but until users are accustomed to this -
we need tables.

That being said, if you work in React.js - why not have a nice table library
for React.js?

edit: grammar

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hawleyal
Most users do not grok tables. Most developers do because they are easy to
automatically generate based on lists of things with common attributes.

Tabular data is a very exclusive set of information in which columns can be
aggregated to sums, counts, et al.

Most tables on the web do not contain tabular data.

