Example for Datatables usage with React and Webpack

This example will mainly focus on how to use Datatables and its extensions in React project instead of diving into the fabulous API.

How to run this example

npm install && npm start

Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080/static/entry

import $ from 'jquery';
import 'datatables.net';

After being imported, you can initialize a table DOM element normally

$(elem).dataTable(options) or $(elem).DataTable(options)

No, because it is deeply coupled with jQuery, it requires jQuery context to intialize the table.

In fact, the DataTable object is imported by default.

import $ from 'jquery';
import DataTable from 'datatables.net';
console.log(DataTable === $.fn.dataTable); // true

import 'bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.css';
import 'datatables.net-bs/js/dataTables.bootstrap';
import 'datatables.net-bs/css/dataTables.bootstrap.css';

Then, make sure you configure the css-loader and style-loader right in webpack.config.js file.

Extend the dataTable.defaults object

$.extend(true, $.fn.dataTable.defaults, {
  language: {
    url: require('../lib/zh_cn.json')
  }
});

Loading i18n files is just like loading icon font files.

{
  test   : /\.(json|ttf|eot|svg|woff(2)?)(\?[a-z0-9]+)?$/,
  loader : 'file-loader',
  query:{
    name:'[name]-[md5:hash:8].[ext]'
  }
}

Check the extensions list, https://www.npmjs.com/~datatables

To import an extension, normaly it would require two steps as following:

import 'datatables.net-fixedheader';
import 'datatables.net-fixedheader-bs/css/fixedHeader.bootstrap.css';

1. Load the extension script, normaly the entry file is defined in package.json main property ;

2. Load the style for specific front-end framework. For example, bs means Bootstrap.

ES6 template is a good choice

Data:

[
  {
    name:'1',
    foo:{
      bar:1
    }
  }
  ...
]

Columns:

[
  {
    data:'foo',
    title:'foo.bar',
    render:foo=>`<em>${foo.bar}</em>`
  }
  ...
}

Let's assume we need to use the react-toggle component in our table.

We have three ways to use it:

Implement render function and use React DOM server's renderToStaticMarkup method

{
  columns:[{
    ...
    render:elem=>renderToStaticMarkup(<Toggle/>)
  }]
  ...
}

Implement datatable createdCell function and create multiple React roots

{
  columns:[{
    ...
    createdCell:(td,val)=>render(<Toggle/>,td)
  }]
  ...
}

Prepare the HTML markup first and then initialize the Datatable

<tbody>
{
  DATA.map(e=><tr key={e.id}>
    <td>{e.id}</td>
    <td data-order={e.id}>{e.name}</td>
    <td>{e.value}</td>
    <td><Toggle/></td>
  </tr>)
}
</tbody>

A performance test page is written to show the difference between these ways

http://localhost:8080/static/toggle

And here is the performance report with 5000 data in table comparing above three options.

Summary:

• If your component is dummy(e.g stateless funtion), use renderToStaticMarkup
• If your component has state, but has no dependency in its context, use render
• If your component has state or has dependency in its context (e.g Redux Componet or React Router Links), use markup

• work with JSON data
• Lifecycle
• Using React in column rendering
• How to avoid conflicts between them
• Work with react-dom/server