Tablinate

Author(s)

Note

This project is dead. It was something I made years ago with friends when we were still not great programmers. It was never a good idea, but it was fun to write none the less. This is still up because I see no reason to take it down, and I occasionally use this repo as a test repo on other projects.

Description

Tablinate is a ruby gem that takes arrays of hashes, ActiveRecord::Relation objects, or a JSON array of hashes, and converts them into html tables. It is intended for use in small projects or applications whose schemas are closely related to standard table formats.

Install

gem install tablinate

Sample Sinatra Code:

1) app.rb

require 'sinatra'
require 'tablinate'

get '/' do
  @employees = [
    { :id => '1', :first_name => "Matt", :last_name => "Smith", :title => "Time Lord" },
    { :id => '2', :first_name => "Jack", :last_name => "Harkness", :title => "Time Agent" },
    { :id => '3', :first_name => "Tom", :last_name => "Baker", :title => "Time Lord" },
    { :id => '4', :first_name => "David", :last_name => "Tennant", :title => "Time Lord" },
    { :id => '5', :first_name => "Christopher", :last_name => "Eccleston", :title => "Time Lord" }
  ]
  haml :index
end

2) views/index.haml

%body
  = @employees.tablinate()

3) view-source:http://localhost:4567/

<body>
  <table>
  <thead>
  <tr>
    <th>id</th>
    <th>first_name</th>
    <th>last_name</th>
    <th>title</th>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
  <tr>
    <td>1</td>
    <td>Matt</td>
    <td>Smith</td>
    <td>Time Lord</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>2</td>
    <td>Jack</td>
    <td>Harkness</td>
    <td>Time Agent</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>3</td>
    <td>Tom</td>
    <td>Baker</td>
    <td>Time Lord</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>David</td>
    <td>Tennant</td>
    <td>Time Lord</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>5</td>
    <td>Christopher</td>
    <td>Eccleston</td>
    <td>Time Lord</td>
  </tr>
  </tbody>
  </table>
</body>

Options

Because it uses normal html markup, tablinated tables are easily styled using CSS, Sass, etc. That being said, tablinate is configurable via an options hash. The hash can style the table or add classes to it. For example:

views/index.haml

%body
  =@employees.tablinate( { :table => { :border => 1, :class => 'fluid' }, :tbody => { :class => 'foo' } } )

view-source:http://localhost:4567/

<body>
  <table border='1' class='fluid'>
  <thead>
  <tr>
    <th>id</th>
    <th>first_name</th>
    <th>last_name</th>
    <th>title</th>
  </thead>
  <tbody class='foo'>
  <tr>
    <td>1</td>
    <td>Matt</td>
    ...
    ...

Further notes on options

Options are highly expandable, and support many useful notations. For example:

@table_params = {
  :table => { :class => "table" },
  :tbody => {
    :tr => { :class => [ 'class1', 'class2', 'class3' ], :id => 'meow' },
    :td => { :class => 'row', :id => [1,2,3] }
  }
}
@table = [
  { :column1 => 'value1', :column2 => 'value2', :column3 => 'value3' },
  { :column1 => 'value1', :column2 => 'value2', :column3 => 'value3' },
  { :column1 => 'value1', :column2 => 'value2', :column3 => 'value3' },
  { :column1 => 'value1', :column2 => 'value2', :column3 => 'value3' }
]

@table.tablinate(@table_params)

<table class='table'>
<thead>
  <tr>
    <th>column1</th>
    <th>column2</th>
    <th>column3</th>
  </tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
  <tr class='class1' id='meow'>
    <td class='row' id='1'>value1</td>
    <td class='row' id='2'>value2</td>
    <td class='row' id='3'>value3</td>
  </tr>
    <tr class='class2' id='meow'>
    <td class='row' id='1'>value1</td>
    <td class='row' id='2'>value2</td>
    <td class='row' id='3'>value3</td>
  </tr>
  <tr class='class3' id='meow'>
    <td class='row' id='1'>value1</td>
    <td class='row' id='2'>value2</td>
    <td class='row' id='3'>value3</td>
  </tr>
  <tr class='class1' id='meow'>
    <td class='row' id='1'>value1</td>
    <td class='row' id='2'>value2</td>
    <td class='row' id='3'>value3</td>
  </tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Haml note

When using haml, you may need to unescape html tags by:

%body
  != [ { ... }, ... ].tablinate(...)

tablinate

Runtime