AwesomeTables¶ ↑

This rails gem is used to easily display, consistently styled tables. It is still very much a work in progress.

Installation is simple.

gem install awesome_tables
# copy the base template to app/views/awesome_tables/_base.html.erb
rails g awesome_tables

Example¶ ↑

In order to use an awesome_table, first you must register it in a helper. Two examples are below.

AwesomeTables.register :posts do |t|
  t.set_caption "Posts"
  t.column :published_at, :display_published_at
  t.column :post, :partial => 'awesome_tables/posts/body'
  t.column :comment_count, :comment_counter, :header_image => 'comment-grey-bubble.png'
end

AwesomeTables.register :users do |t|
  t.set_caption "Users"
  t.column :full_name
  t.column :login
  t.column :email
  t.column :state
end

Now you can use them in your views

<%= awesome_table :users, @users %>
<%= awesome_table :posts, @posts %>

There are currently 4 different ways to declare a column.

1. t.column(:method) A plain td can be created by passing in an object attribute. The header will be a titlized version of the method name.

2. t.column(:header_text, :method) If you want the header text to be different than the method.

3. t.column(:header_text, :partial => ‘path/to/partial) If your td data is more complex than a method name, add a partial option.

4. You can pass a block to the call to column. I couldn’t figure out how to get rails helpers to call correctly when defined inside the block so ‘c’ is a reference to allow you to use view helpers

t.column :full_name do |obj, c| obj.full_name +

	c.content_tag(:div, :class => 'actions') do
  	c.link_to("Edit", c.edit_admin_user_path(obj))
	end

end

The :header_image option will use the image as the column header instead header text. That code and the way it is used needs some attention. Things have changed a little bit since I put that in there.

You’ll need to make sure that you create an awesome tables view folder. There is a base example table contained in lib/app/views/awesome_tables.

TODO¶ ↑

• tests, tests, tests

• figure out how to change the templates so that they don’t have column loops inside of the object loop

• add more and better options support. Currently there is only a :class (and :header_image) option for columns and the way the :class option is implemented looks nasty.

• create different formatters so awesome_tables can be used to output tables in formats other than html tables.

Copyright © 2010 Dan Engle, released under the MIT license