Question

Is there a quick/easy way to have tabular data and have a button that turns them to thumbnails (kind of a 2-view system, table/thumb)–I’m not looking for image thumbnails…

Any ideas are appreciated! 🙂

Examples:

Answer 1

If you’d like to render a standard table and then use jQuery to build the thumbnail view, then here’s an example:

Rendered HTML:

<a href="#" id="changeview">Change view</a>
<table id="theTable">
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>Name</th>
            <th>Description</th>
        <tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td>Item 1</td>
            <td>Description 1</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>Item 2</td>
            <td>Description 2</td>
        </tr>
        ...
    </tbody>
</table>​

jQuery:

var thumbnails = $('<ul></ul>').attr('id', 'theThumbnails').insertAfter('#theTable').hide();
$('#theTable tbody tr').each(function() {
    var cells = $(this).find('td');
    var thumbnail = $('<li></li>').addClass('thumbnail');
    $('<h3></h3>').text($(cells[0]).text()).appendTo(thumbnail);
    $('<p></p>').text($(cells[1]).text()).appendTo(thumbnail);
    thumbnail.appendTo(thumbnails);
});

$('#changeview').live('click', function() {
    $('#theTable, #theThumbnails').toggle();
});

Actually you can shorten the jQuery code a bit by chaining some of the statements.

Here’s a working example: http://jsfiddle.net/2PCnL/1/