Raible Designs

RE: Client-side Sorting with the DOM

After working the DOM for the past few days, I'm somewhat motivated to make my table row sorting demo support paging. In reality, it doesn't matter which table-sorting code I use, Erik Arvidsson has a nice example too. My logic is that I usually query a database and return all the rows for a particular table anyway, sometimes based on a search. Since I'm retrieving all these rows from the database, why not send them all to the UI. It might take a bit longer for the initial request, but then again, maybe not. I'm sure it's a different story for 10,000 records, but what if I only ever expect to have < 100 rows. Here's how I think I can do it:

1. Retrieve all the rows and put them in a table.
2. Call a JavaScript function on load that sets all <tr>'s (i.e. var rows = table.getElementsByTagName("tr")) with a rowIndex > 20 to rows[i].style.display = "none".
3. When a user clicks on a page number, do the math and set rows[i].style.display="" or rows[i].style.display="none" to show/hide particular rows.

BTW, I've added support in my local copy of the sortTable.js script to do sorting of <input> elements, as well as <select> elements. I can update the demo if anyone needs this functionality. Also, the W3C has a cool utility to check out what level of DOM support your browser has (based on user agent).

NOTE: I tried to manage my time today to be more productive, and succeeded at most things. I woke up at 3:30 this morning and got an hour and a half worth of editing done. I worked 8 1/2 hours at the office, and was home by 3:30. I was planning on working another 1 1/2 on editing, but it was a nice day so Julie, Abbie and I went on a hike at Red Rocks instead. I met a friend at 5:30 for an hour and a half of hoops, and returned home at 7:30. I got on this damn computer at 8:00 to do my evening editing, but instead ended up blogging and reading blogs for the last hour and a half. A month ago, I'd stay up late and still get my editing done. Not now, Abbie is much more fun and editing just doesn't sound interesting at all.