I haven’t used this gem in years, and am no longer actively contributing to it. I am more than willing to give commit rights to anyone that wants to maintain it.

Inspired by the projects table_builder and formtastic, I realized how often I created tables for my active record collections. This is my attempt to simplify this (the default scaffold):

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>Title</th>
    <th>Body</th>
    <th>Author Id</th>
  </tr>
  <% for post in @posts %>
    <tr>
      <td><%=h post.title %></td>
      <td><%=h post.body %></td>
      <td><%=h post.author_id %></td>
      <td><%= link_to "Show", post %></td>
      <td><%= link_to "Edit", edit_post_path(post) %></td>
      <td><%= link_to "Destroy", post, :confirm => 'Are you sure?', :method => :delete %></td>
      </tr>
  <% end %>
</table>

into this:

<%= table_for(@posts) do |t|
      t.data :actions => :all
    end %>

and still output the same effective results, but with all the semantic goodness that tabular data should have, i.e. a thead and tbody element.

In your Rails project, Gemfile:

gem "tabletastic"

Or, for if you’re behind the times, as a plugin:

script/plugin install git://github.com/jgdavey/tabletastic.git

Optionally, you can create an initializer at config/initializers/tabletastic.rb with the following:

Tabletastic.default_table_block = lambda {|table| table.data :actions => :all }

By default, you can just use the table_for method to build up your table. Assuming you have a Post model with title and body, that belongs to an Author model with a name, you can just use the helper. It will try to detect all content fields and belongs to associations.

In your view, simply calling:

<%= table_for(@posts) do |t|
      t.data
    end %>

will produce html like this:

<table id="posts">
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Title</th>
      <th>Body</th>
      <th>Author</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr class="post odd" id="post_1">
      <td>Something</td>
      <td>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consequat. Duis aute irure dolor.</td>
      <td>Jim Beam</td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="post even" id="post_2">
      <td>Second Post</td>
      <td>This is the second post</td>
      <td>Jack Daniels</td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="post odd" id="post_3">
      <td>Something else</td>
      <td>Blah!</td>
      <td></td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

To limit the fields, change the order, or to include fields that are excluded by default (such as created_at), You can list methods to call on each resource:

<%= table_for(@posts) do |t|
  t.data :author, :title, :created_at
end %>

will produce html like:

<table id="posts">
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Author</th>
      <th>Title</th>
      <th>Created at</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr id="post_1" class="post odd">
      <td>Jim Beam</td>
      <td>Something</td>
      <td>2009-11-15 02:42:48 UTC</td>
    </tr>
    <tr id="post_2" class="post even">
      <td>Jack Daniels</td>
      <td>Second Post</td>
      <td>2009-11-16 00:11:00 UTC</td>
    </tr>
    <tr id="post_3" class="post odd">
      <td></td>
      <td>Something else</td>
      <td>2009-11-16 00:11:30 UTC</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

For even greater flexibility, you can pass data a block:

<%= table_for(@posts) do |t|
  t.data :actions => :all do
    t.cell(:title, :cell_html => {:class => "titlestring"})
    t.cell(:body, :heading => "Content") {|p| truncate(p.body, 30)}
    t.cell(:author) {|p| p.author && link_to(p.author.name, p.author) }
  end
end %>

will product html like:

<table id="posts">
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Title</th>
      <th>Content</th>
      <th>Author</th>
      <th></th>
      <th></th>
      <th></th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr class="post odd" id="post_1">
      <td class="titlestring">Something</td>
      <td>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,...</td>
      <td>
        <a href="/authors/1">Jim Bean</a>
      </td>
      <td class="actions show_link">
        <a href="/posts/1">Show</a>
      </td>
      <td class="actions edit_link">
        <a href="/posts/1/edit">Edit</a>
      </td>
      <td class="actions destroy_link">
        <a href="/posts/1/edit">Destroy</a> <!-- inline javascript omitted -->
      </td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="post even" id="post_2">
      <td class="titlestring">Second Post</td>
      <td>This is the second post</td>
      <td>
        <a href="/authors/2">Jack Daniels</a>
      </td>
      <td class="actions show_link">
        <a href="/posts/2">Show</a>
      </td>
      <td class="actions edit_link">
        <a href="/posts/2/edit">Edit</a>
      </td>
      <td class="actions destroy_link">
        <a href="/posts/2/edit">Destroy</a> <!-- inline javascript omitted -->
      </td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="post odd" id="post_3">
      <td class="titlestring">Something else</td>
      <td>Blah!</td>
      <td></td>
      <td class="actions show_link">
        <a href="/posts/3">Show</a>
      </td>
      <td class="actions edit_link">
        <a href="/posts/3/edit">Edit</a>
      </td>
      <td class="actions destroy_link">
        <a href="/posts/3/edit">Destroy</a> <!-- inline javascript omitted -->
      </td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

If it still isn’t flexible enough for your needs, it might be time to return to static html/erb.

Tabletastic has some i18n-features enabled by default.

Here is an example of locales:

en:
  tabletastic:
      actions:
          show: "See"
          edit: "Edit"
          destroy: "Remove"
          confirmation: "Are you sure?"
      models:
          comment:
              title: "Title"

As of version 0.2.0, you can now setup some of your own defaults in an initializer file.

For example, create a file called tabletastic.rb in your config/initializers folder.

Within that file, there are several defaults that you can setup for yourself, including:

Tabletastic.default_table_html
Tabletastic.default_table_block

Both of these options are setup up so that inline options will still override whatever they are set to, but providing them here will save you some code if you commonly reuse options.

By default, default_table_html is simple an empty hash {}. By providing your own defaults, you can ensure that all of your tables have a specific html class or cellspacing, or whatever.

If Tabletastic.default_table_html is set to {:cellspacing => 0, :class => 'yowza'}, then all tabletastic tables will have this html by default, unless overridden:

table_for(@posts) do |t|  # body of block removed for brevity

will produce:

<table class="yowza" cellspacing="0" id="posts">

Similarly, all of those calls to table_for can get boring since you might be using the same block every time. The option default_table_block lets you set a default lambda so that you can omit the block with table_for. Since by default default_table_block is set to lambda{|table| table.data}, the following:

<%= table_for(@posts) %>

will be the same as

<%= table_for(@posts) do |t|
      t.data
    end %>

However, just like default_table_html , you can set a different block in the initializer file for your block to default to.

For example:

Tabletastic.default_table_block = lambda {|table| table.data :actions => :all }

will make the following equivalent:

<%= table_for(@posts) %>

<%= table_for(@posts) do |t|
      t.data :actions => :all
    end %>

And to omit those action links, you can just use table_for the old-fashioned way:

<%= table_for(@posts) do |t|
      t.data
    end %>

• Fork the project.

• Make your feature addition or bug fix.

• Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.

• Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or changelog. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)

• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Copyright © 2011 Joshua Davey. See LICENSE for details.