I just wanted to take a minute to plug Standardista Table Sorting, a nifty set of Javascript routines that automagically sorts rows in HTML tables. I was recently asked to add row sorting to myUMBC’s class list function, and my first thought was to do it in Javascript, which would give the end user instant results as well as reducing server and database overhead — a double win. I started out writing something myself, then decided to poke around and see if someone had already written something. I found the Standardista stuff, and it works great.
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Getting this working was fairly straightforward. I had to modify myUMBC’s Perl HTML ‘table’ object so that it sets the headings apart from the body with <thead> and <tbody> tags. Then, I just added <script> blocks to pull in the Standardista Javascript code, and gave my tables the sortable class.
At first, it didn’t work. It turns out the Standardista stuff doesn’t like any additional markup (text decoration, font tags, etc) within the heading tags. Once I got rid of the markup, it worked.
I also had to fiddle a bit to get the sorting to play nicely with my striped rows (alternating white and light gray). The Standardista code includes support for striping, but I had to change the way I was applying CSS to my table (move the class attribute from the <td> elements to the <tr> elements), and I also tweaked the Standardista code to use my CSS attribute (myumbcLightGray) instead of its own (odd). With uPortal, I have to be sensitive to CSS namespace collision issues, and odd was a bit too generic. Once I made these adjustments, my striping was preserved after sorting.
This is a really cool package and I highly recommend it for any table-sorting application.