React Final Table

A headless UI component libray for managing complex table state in React.

Inspired by react-table but with Typescript support built in and a simpler API.

Features

• Type safe
• Global row filtering
• Row selection
• Custom column rendering
• Column sorting
• Data memoization for performance
• Zero dependencies

Table of Contents

• Motivation
• Install
• Demos
  • CodeSandbox Demo
  • Material UI Demo
• useTable
• Examples
  • Basic example
  • Searching
  • Row Selection
  • Pagination
• Performance
• Contributing

Motivation

While there is an abundance of table libraries out there to help with sorting, filtering, pagination, and more, most are opinionated about the user interface. Opinionated UIs can seem nice at first, but they quickly become limiting. To embrace the Unix philosphy of separation of concerns, the interface should be separate from the engine (from The Art of Unix Programming).

This is a minimal, type-safe, headless UI component library that you can plugin to whatever frontend you're using, as long as you're using React 16 and Hooks. You are then free to style your table any way you want while using React Final Table to manage complex state changes.

Install

npm install react-final-table

Demos

Basic Demo

Material UI Demo

useTable

This is the main hook exposed by the library and should be your entrypoint for any table functionality. Only columns and rows are required as arguments:

const { headers, rows } = useTable(columns, rows);

1. columns: The first argument is an array of columns of type ColumnType. Only the name of each column is required. Each column has the following type signature:

type ColumnType<T> = {
  name: string;
  label?: string;
  hidden?: boolean;
  sort?: ((a: RowType<T>, b: RowType<T>) => number) | undefined;
  render?: ({ value, row }: { value: any; row: T }) => React.ReactNode;
  headerRender?: ({ label }: { label: string }) => React.ReactNode;
};

2. rows: Rows is the second argument to useTable and can be an array of any object type.

Examples

Basic example

import { useTable } from 'react-final-table';

const columns = [
  {
    name: 'firstName',
    label: 'First Name',
    render: ({ value }) => <h1>{value}</h1>,
  },
  {
    name: 'lastName',
    label: 'Last Name',
  },
];

const data = [
  {
    firstName: 'Frodo',
    lastName: 'Baggins',
  },
  {
    firstName: 'Samwise',
    lastName: 'Gamgee',
  },
];

const MyTable = () => {
  const { headers, rows } = useTable(columns, data);

  return (
    <table>
      <thead>
        <tr>
          {headers.map((header, idx) => (
            <th key={idx}>{header.label}</th>
          ))}
        </tr>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
        {rows.map((row, idx) => (
          <tr key={idx}>
            {row.cells.map((cell, idx) => (
              <td key={idx}>{cell.render()}</td>
            ))}
          </tr>
        ))}
      </tbody>
    </table>
  );
};

Searching

const Table: FC = () => {
    const { headers, rows, setSearchString } = useTable(
      columns,
      data,
    );

    return (
      <>
        <input
          type="text"
          onChange={e => {
            setSearchString(e.target.value);
          }}
        ></input>
        <table>
          <thead>
            <tr>
              {headers.map((header, idx) => (
                <th key={idx}>
                  {header.render()}
                </th>
              ))}
            </tr>
          </thead>
          <tbody>
            {rows.map((row, idx) => (
              <tr key={idx}>
                {row.cells.map((cell, idx) => (
                  <td key={idx}>{cell.render()}</td>
                ))}
              </tr>
            ))}
          </tbody>
        </table>
      </>
    );

Row Selection

import React, { useMemo } from 'react';
import { useTable } from 'react-final-table';
import makeData from 'makeData'; // replace this with your own data

function App() {
  const { columns, rows } = makeData();

  const { headers, rows, selectRow, selectedRows } = useTable(
    memoColumns,
    memoData,
    {
      selectable: true,
    }
  );

  return (
    <>
      <table>
        <thead>
          <tr>
            <th></th>
            {headers.map((header, idx) => (
              <th key={idx}>{header.label}</th>
            ))}
          </tr>
        </thead>
        <tbody>
          {rows.map((row, idx) => (
            <tr key={idx}>
              <td>
                <input
                  type="checkbox"
                  onChange={e => {
                    selectRow(row.id);
                  }}
                />
              </td>
              {row.cells.map((cell, idx) => (
                <td key={idx}>{cell.render()}</td>
              ))}
            </tr>
          ))}
        </tbody>
      </table>
    </>
  );
}

Pagination

export const App: FC = () => {
  const memoColumns = useMemo(() => columns, []);
  const memoData = useMemo(() => data, []);

  const { headers, rows, pagination } = useTable<{
    firstName: string;
    lastName: string;
  }>(memoColumns, memoData, { pagination: true });

  return (
    <>
      <table>
        <thead>
          <tr>
            {headers.map((header, idx) => (
              <th key={idx}>{header.render()}</th>
            ))}
          </tr>
        </thead>
        <tbody>
          {rows.map((row, idx) => (
            <tr key={idx}>
              {row.cells.map((cell, idx) => (
                <td key={idx}>{cell.render()}</td>
              ))}
            </tr>
          ))}
        </tbody>
      </table>
      <div>
        <button
          disabled={pagination.canPrev}
          onClick={() => pagination.prevPage()}
        >
          {'<'}
        </button>
        <button
          disabled={pagination.canNext}
          onClick={() => pagination.nextPage()}
        >
          {'>'}
        </button>
      </div>
    </>
  );
}

Performance

It's recommended that you memoize your columns and data using useMemo. This is to prevent the table from rerendering everytime your component rerenders, which can have negative consequences on performance.

Contributing

Contributing is welcome. Please read the CONTRIBUTING doc for more.