Did anyone try to embed Datatables into Topic Body?

Hello Community,

Did anyone try to embed Data tables into Topic Body ? Any plugin or theme ?

Thanks,

2 Likes

I tried making tables with a some links to images within a cell and failed. See: How to make a nice table in a post?

So by extension, I don’t think basic Discourse will allow this.

If it is possible I would like to know how.

Since the site I am on can not add more plug-ins per the plan/agreement, I could not run down that option path.

1 Like

Yeah, I don’t know how to implement this.

Not the full boat, but maybe good enough to get you started.


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The above HTML was created by opening link provided (using Chorme), press F12,
select HTML in code viewer

then (Windows) right mouse select Copy -> Copy OutterHTML

and pasted into this post.

I know it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of the original, but at least you can compare this HTML with the original and see what Discourse filters out to learn what you can and can not do.

Also if someone with more trust can convert this to a Wiki so others can view the raw HTML it would be appreciated.

HTH


EDIT

Expanding on cutting and pasting, I cut the full page out and pasted into a post at try.discourse.org to see if the buttons for sorting would make it through. No such luck.

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That result is just a Markdown table which is supported by Discourse:

https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet#tables

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Great. But does it have Data table functionality like sorting, searching ?

No.

My best guess on how to do that would be to use JavaScript, but I don’t know how much of that will be filtered out of Discourse. When I ran into the same line of problems, I eventually came to the conclusion that it would be easier to to put the page with the info somewhere else and provide a link. Don’t try and force Discourse into something it is not, and don’t try and circumvent the security Discourse provides, it is there for a good reason.

3 Likes

That’s true, My best option is adding the datatable in an html page and embed it into Discourse topic using iframe.

Datatables is a jQuery plugin. jQuery plugins can be implemented quite easily in Discourse. There are a couple of examples of this like the Tiles and Slick gallery theme components.

Essentially, what you need to do is to create a decorator for posts that contain tables that you want to target with dataTables.

I’ve created an example of how you can do that here

https://github.com/hnb-ku/dataTables_Demo

and created a preview for it on theme creator here

It’s obviously a bit basic for now, and it’s missing some styles but it should be a good starting point as sorting, searching and pagination work just fine.

12 Likes

This is incredibe :slight_smile: Thank you very much

3 Likes

I have several tables that I’d like to include in my forum and your approach works perfectly. I’ve created this theme component initializer file:

import { apiInitializer } from 'discourse/lib/api';
import loadScript from 'discourse/lib/load-script';

export default apiInitializer('0.11.1', (api) => {
  api.decorateCookedElement(
    (elem, helper) => {
      const dataTables = $('[data-wrap="dataTables"] table', elem);
      if (!dataTables.length) return;

      loadScript('https://cdn.datatables.net/1.10.25/js/jquery.dataTables.min.js').then(
        () => {
          $.fn.dataTable.ext.errMode = 'throw';

          dataTables.dataTable({
            ajax: {
              url:
                'https://gist.githubusercontent.com/USERNAME/MY_GIST_ID/raw/data.json',
              dataSrc(data) {
                return data.map((x) => {
                  return {
                    id: x.my_id,
                    title: `${x.number} - ${x.title}`,
                  };
                });
              },
            },
            columns: [
              { data: 'id', title: 'My ID' }, 
              { data: 'title', title: 'My Title' }
            ],
            dom: 'Bfrt',
          });
        }
      );
    },
    { id: 'discourse-my-custom-data-tables', onlyStream: true }
  );
});

And I load the table in the post using this:

[wrap=dataTables]
<table></table>
[/wrap]

However, there are multiple things I’d like to customize for each table and I’m not sure how to go about it.

For example:

  • I’d like to use a different Gist Id for each table. That should be easy enough by passing an attribute to the wrap and then accessing it with elem.children[0].dataset.gist:

    [wrap=dataTables gist="some_gist_id"]
    <table></table>
    [/wrap]
    
  • But what if I want multiple tables, each with different processing code in the dataSrc function or different column or dom parameters?

    Is there a way to pass a JS config file to dataTables.dataTable()?

3 Likes

Is there a set number of variations you would likely use for different tables, or will you need to use custom ones for each table?

1 Like

Custom ones for each table.

My current approach is to create helper js files with different configurations and choose between them via an attribute in the [wrap] block. Then I do:

dataTables.dataTable(Object.assign(commonConfig, specificConfig(myAttributes)))

But I’d be curious to know if there’s a more flexible solution.

1 Like