Question

I am trying to evaluate tools to create a resource schedule viewer. The rows would be resources (with collapsible subrows), and the columns would be time (days, weeks, etc). None of the grid frameworks I have looked into seem to accommodate that use case philosophically (i.e. loosely defined, infinite columns), does anyone have any recommendations?

Answer 1

I’m switching from jqGrid to SlickGrid after three months of usage.

jqGrid is fine, after all it’s the most popular JavaScript grid plugin. But:

• Documentation can be not only be incomplete but also misleading, aside from somewhat condescending. Mostly you’ll end up getting things done, but after a painful debug/search routine.

• In a similar way, API naming could be much, much better. For example: addJSONData() actually accepts an object, or a certain methods’ parameters include rowid and iRow.

• It tries to do it everything for you, from AJAX calls to sorting, parsing data and formatting it. Try to do something your own way and you’ll discover that jqGrid doesn’t favour separation of concerns.

• It’s not a true open source project – many lines are practically obfuscated – whereas SlickGrid includes JSDoc comments and all.

Haven’t tried SlickGrid yet, but it just looks so fine. Its author is now hired at Google and the project has excellent stats at GitHub. These words totally convinced me:

The key difference is between SlickGrid and other grid implementations
I have seen is that they focus too much on being able to understand
and work with data and not enough on being a better grid.

Also, virtual rendering is clearly superior than just dropping N <tr> elements.