Allow clickable links in table rows

[mturoci]

via @vopani

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

It helps improving a base UX to render urls directly as links thus making them clickable as opposed to plaintext that user has to manually copy and paste to browser url bar.

Describe the solution you'd like

We have 2 options here:

• Auto detect if the plaintext is a link and render anchor tag correspondingly.
• Provide a data_type: 'link' and render accordingly.
• Add additional TableCellType - LinkTableCellType

Additional context

We already have a link attribute on TableColumnType that specifies the primary clickable column and might cause confusion so we need to be careful about naming.

cc @lo5 @geomodular for discussion

[mturoci]

As suggested by @mneuhaus in our Discourse, one possible solution would be to allow markdown as table cell content (instead of plain string). This would also add additional text formatting flexibility if needed.

[sergiomora03]

But if we use that, we couldn't use ui.progress_table_cell_type(), right?

[mturoci]

Why not? This proposal would only enhance existing string column capabilities with markdown. If you specify cell_type as ui.progress_table_cell_type() for example, you get the desired progress instead of string like it is now.

[lo5]

One aspect we need to consider before doing this is to make our markdown-to-HTML conversion a bit smarter. It currently wraps all text in <p></p> which would introduce unwanted whitespace inside table cells, so it would be good to handle some special cases at the markdown level (e.g. unwrap single-lines, etc.) instead of attempting a post-fix in the table's CSS.

[mturoci]

On second thought, enabling link support via our existing ui.link probably makes more sense as markdown links are quite limited and only support opening links in current tab which would not satisfy #567. Using ui.link would also allow downloads which may be a common scenario in a lot of apps.

[UK-17]

Any update on this ? I was making a JIRA issue tracker table using ui.table
It would be really helpful if links are allowed and i can redirect each row to its jira page.

[mturoci]

We will try to include it within the next release.

[mturoci]

Related #1379