Grid Feature Requests

[cpantel]

Ext's grid is great. Many of the enhancements coming in GridView3 will be useful for me as well (expander rows, checkboxes for selection, row numbers, etc). There are a few additional features I would like as part of the standard Ext grid.

1. Tree Grid

treegrid.com (http://www.treegrid.com/) has been referenced a few times in the forums. I don't necessarily need all that flexibility and functionality. What I would like most is for the left-most column in the grid be able to contain a tree. There are two cases this should be able to handle:
(a) Each internal node (not a leaf) serves as a label for its children (it has no column values of its own)
(b) Each internal node has rolled-up values representing its children.

2. Live Scrolling

As an alternative to grid paging with a paging toolbar, I would like to have the grid's vertical scrollbar handle fetching data from the server. When implemented for good performance, it can be a big usability boost as it avoids the confusing situation when you have more records then can be displayed (so you need a scrollbar) and you need to interact with paging buttons. Also, the grid is visually simplified because there are fewer UI controls on it that the user has to visually parse and understand.

3. Column-based Filtering

Grid filters essentially like those described by jsakalos here (http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6662&highlight=grid+filter).

4. Editable Grid Editor Options

(a) A configuration option for enabling editors for the entire row in focus rather than just one cell at a time
(b) An option for enabling editors with a single click rather than a double-click. This makes editable fields much more discoverable since Web users are not accustomed to double-clicking.

Thanks!

[jack.slocum]

1. A tree grid is a component that takes a lot of development (some companies have that as their only offering!) and has a small window of use cases. Those 2 things combined make it unlikely we will be developing it any time soon. It is pretty easy though to create a lightweight TreeNodeUI to support columns in your tree.

2. This is planned for a future release.

3. GridView3 has the menus in place for Vista Explorer style filtering. However, you would have to create the filter menu items. We will be creating an example to demonstrate how you can do it for Ext 2.0.

4a. This is pretty non-standard. Can you point me to a use case where it would be preferable?
4b. is already there via the config option clicksToEdit:1

Thanks!

[cpantel]

Thanks for the reply.

1. Regarding the TreeGrid, thinking of it as a simpler multi-column tree would work for me. I think that is what you mean by a lightweight TreeNodeUI. Is that something you plan on building? If not, can you offer some guidance on how to best approach it?

4(a). A lot of business applications use grids a lot where every row represents a record. The way users interact with these grids is very row-oriented (record-by-record). This is a bit different than Excel, for example, where the interaction can be much more cell-oriented. Since users think of each row as a unit, it is useful to reinforce that by enabling the editors for the entire row. This is analogous to having the ability to highlight entire rows for selection and as mouse-over as opposed to highlighting only cells.

[jack.slocum]

I have put together a very basic Tree with columns example for Ext 2.0. It will be hitting svn today.

[jack.slocum]

I built a tree with columns example and it is in SVN (the ext2.0 branch). Here's a screenshot:

http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?p=35226

[Green]

1. A tree grid is a component that takes a lot of development (some companies have that as their only offering!) and has a small window of use cases. Those 2 things combined make it unlikely we will be developing it any time soon. It is pretty easy though to create a lightweight TreeNodeUI to support columns in your tree.


That it is a lot of work, I won't dispute. But a small window of use cases?

There is basically not an asp.net style grid around which does not provide for the famed "Drag column here to group by"-functionality. Which effectively boils down to a "sort"+"filter" for the end-user in a single move (and which can not possible work without column 1 changed to a multi-level tree-like control). It is very very powerful stuff, and my experience have shown that, if available, users will use it almost constantly to organize the data more effectively for what they want or need to do with/from it.

At the very least one should keep such a feature in mind for Ext 5.0 while working on Ext 1 and 2 so that the foundation for this is solid and available one day. Here is a demo of one of the better asp.net ajax grids:
http://demos.devexpress.com/ASPxGrid2Demos/CS/

[jack.slocum]

Row grouping is not the same as a tree grid. A tree grid has a hierarchical dataset while row grouping just organizes records.

[cchiriac]

I'd like to add one request to the list : nested headers.
Basically this would mean beeing able to display reports or organizing data in subcolumns. Combined with row grouping i guess this would be really powerfull :D

I can imagine this is a lot of work so i don't have hopes for 2.0 release. But Ext is so great that for me it's definitely worth waiting !
Thanks!