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Tables

Benefits of using <table> Provider
Clean way of displaying tabular data Browser
Great browser support Browser
Can copy paste the table into other applications Browser
Can reorder items in the table! react-beautiful-dnd 😎

react-beautiful-dnd requires no additional wrapping elements to create Draggable and Droppable components. Therefore it is possible to have a <table> that has valid HTML as well as supporting drag and drop.

We have not found a way to achieve semantic reordering of table columns at this stage. This is because there is no one element that represents a table column - rather, a column is a result of cell placements within repeating rows. As such as cannot wrap a Draggable around a 'column' in order to make it draggable. PR's to this guide are welcome if you find a working approach!

Strategies

There are two strategies you can use when reordering tables.

  1. Fixed layouts (faster and simplier)
  2. Dimension locking (slower but more robust)

Strategy 1: fixed layouts

In order to use this strategy the widths of your columns need to be fixed - that is, they will not change depending on what content is placed in the cells. This can be achieve with either a table-layout: fixed or table-layout: auto as long as you manually set the width of the cells (eg 50%).

The only thing you need to do is set display: table on a Draggable row while it is dragging.

See example code here

Strategy 2: dimension locking

This strategy will work with columns that have automatic column widths based on content. It will also work with fixed layouts. It is a more robust strategy than the first, but it is also less performant.

When we apply position: fixed to the dragging item it removes it from the automatic column width calculations that a table uses. So before a drag starts we lock all of the cell widths using inline styles to prevent the column dimensions from changing when a drag starts. You can achieve this with the onBeforeDragStart hook.

This has poor performance characteristics at scale as it requires:

  1. Calling render() on every row
  2. Reading the DOM (window.getComputedStyles) on every row

For tables with less than 50 rows this should approach be fine!

See example code here

Advanced: using React.Portal

If you want to use React.Portal in combination with table row reordering then there are few extra steps you need to go through.

First up, have a read of our using a portal pattern to get familiar with the approach.

It is important to know things timings of mount / unmount actions in React. We have created a codesandbox.io example to show how the mount timings work when moving in and out of a React.Portal.

When moving an existing <tr> into a React.Portal it is important to know that the existing <tr> is unmounted and a new <tr> is mounted into the portal. Here is the order of those operations:

  1. The old <tr> has componentWillUnmount called
  2. The new <tr> has componentWillMount called

In order to preserve the cell dimensions of the cells in the row that we are moving into a React.Portal we need to lock its dimensions using inline styles (see strategy #2). Sadly though, the new component does not directly have access to the information about the component that was in the tree before it moved to the portal. So in order to do this we need to obtain the cell dimensions of the <tr> when it is unmounting and re-apply it to the new <tr> when it mounted in componentDidMount.

There is no great way to do this as when componentDidMount is called we are not sure if the component is unmouting as the tr is no longer needed, or if it is unmounting because it is about to move into a portal.

It seems like the only way to get things working is to:

  1. In componentWillUnmount of the tr read the current widths of the cells from the DOM. You then store this value outside of the component so that it can be read by new components that are mounting.
  2. If a component is mounting and DraggableStateSnapshot > isDragging is true then you can see if there is a previously recorded width. If there is then you can apply that width.

This gets a little complicated - so we created another example for you showing you how this technique works! You're welcome!