Stupid jQuery Table Sort

This is a stupid jQuery table sorting plugin. Nothing fancy, nothing really impressive. Overall, stupidly simple. Requires jQuery 1.7 or newer.

View the demo here

See the examples directory.

Installation via npm

$ npm i stupid-table-plugin

Installation via Bower

$ bower install jquery-stupid-table

Example Usage

The JS:

$("table").stupidtable();

The HTML:

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th data-sort="int">int</th>
      <th data-sort="float">float</th>
      <th data-sort="string">string</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>15</td>
      <td>-.18</td>
      <td>banana</td>
    </tr>
    ...
    ...
    ...

The thead and tbody tags must be used.

Add a data-sort attribute of "DATATYPE" to the th elements to make them sortable by that data type. If you don't want that column to be sortable, just omit the data-sort attribute.

Predefined data types

Our aim is to keep this plugin as lightweight as possible. Consequently, the only predefined datatypes that you can pass to the th elements are

• int
• float
• string (case-sensitive)
• string-ins (case-insensitive)

These data types will be sufficient for many simple tables. However, if you need different data types for sorting, you can easily create your own!

Data with multiple representations/predefined order

Stupid Table lets you sort a column by computer friendly values while displaying human friendly values via the data-sort-value attribute on a td element. For example, to sort timestamps (computer friendly) but display pretty formated dates (human friendly)

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th data-sort="string">Name</th>
      <th data-sort="int">Birthday</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>Joe McCullough</td>
      <td data-sort-value="672537600">April 25, 1991</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Clint Dempsey</td>
      <td data-sort-value="416016000">March 9, 1983</td>
    </tr>
    ...
    ...
    ...

In this example, Stupid Table will sort the Birthday column by the timestamps provided in the data-sort-value attributes of the corresponding tds. Since timestamps are integers, and that's what we're sorting the column by, we specify the Birthday column as an int column in the data-sort value of the column header.

Default sorting direction

By default, columns will sort ascending. You can specify a column to sort "asc" or "desc" first.

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
        <th data-sort="float" data-sort-default="desc">float</th>
        ...
    </tr>
  </thead>
</table>

Sorting a column on load

If you want a specific column to be sorted immediately after $table.stupidtable() is called, you can provide a data-sort-onload=yes attribute.

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
        <th data-sort="float" data-sort-onload=yes>float</th>
        ...
    </tr>
  </thead>
</table>

Multicolumn sorting

A multicolumn sort allows you to define secondary columns to sort by in the event of a tie with two elements in the sorted column. See examples/multicolumn-sort.html. Specify a comma-separated list of th identifiers in a data-sort-multicolumn attribute on a <th> element. An identifier can be an integer (which represents the index of the th element of the multicolumn target) or a string (which represents the id of the th element of the multicolumn target).

Sorting a column programatically

After you have called $("#mytable").stupidtable(), if you wish to sort a column without requiring the user to click on it, select the column th and call

var $table = $("#mytable").stupidtable();
var $th_to_sort = $table.find("thead th").eq(0);
$th_to_sort.stupidsort();

// You can also force a direction.
$th_to_sort.stupidsort('asc');
$th_to_sort.stupidsort('desc');

Updating a table cell's value

If you wish for Stupid Table to respond to changes in the table cell values, you must explicitely inform Stupid Table to update its cache with the new values. If you update the table display/sort values without using this mechanism, your newly updated table will not sort correctly!

/*
 * Suppose $age_td is some td in a table under a column specified as an int
 * column. stupidtable() must already be called for this table.
 */
$age_td.updateSortVal(23);

Note that this only changes the internal sort value (whether you specified a data-sort-value or not). Use the standard jQuery .text() / .html() methods if you wish to change the display values.

Callbacks

To execute a callback function after a table column has been sorted, you can bind on aftertablesort.

var table = $("table").stupidtable();
table.bind('aftertablesort', function (event, data) {
    // data.column - the index of the column sorted after a click
    // data.direction - the sorting direction (either asc or desc)
    // data.$th - the th element (in jQuery wrapper)
    // $(this) - this table object

    console.log("The sorting direction: " + data.direction);
    console.log("The column index: " + data.column);
});

Similarly, to execute a callback before a table column has been sorted, you can bind on beforetablesort.

See the complex_example.html file.

Creating your own data types

Sometimes you don't have control over the HTML produced by the backend. In the event you need to sort complex data without a data-sort-value attribute, you can create your own data type. Creating your own data type for sorting purposes is easy as long as you are comfortable using custom functions for sorting. Consult Mozilla's Docs if you're not.

Let's create an alphanum datatype for a User ID that takes strings in the form "D10", "A40", and sorts the column based on the numbers in the string.

<thead>
  <tr>
    <th data-sort="string">Name</th>
    <th data-sort="int">Age</th>
    <th data-sort="alphanum">UserID</th>
  </tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
  <tr>
    <td>Joseph McCullough</td>
    <td>20</td>
    <td>D10</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Justin Edwards</td>
    <td>29</td>
    <td>A40</td>
  </tr>
  ...
  ...
  ...

Now we need to specify how the alphanum type will be sorted. To do that, we do the following:

$("table").stupidtable({
  "alphanum":function(a,b){

    var pattern = "^[A-Z](\\d+)$";
    var re = new RegExp(pattern);

    var aNum = re.exec(a).slice(1);
    var bNum = re.exec(b).slice(1);

    return parseInt(aNum,10) - parseInt(bNum,10);
  }
});

This extracts the integers from the cell and compares them in the style that sort functions use.

StupidTable Settings

As of 1.1.0 settings have been introduced. Settings are defined like so:

var $table = $("#mytable");
$table.stupidtable_settings({
    // Settings for this table specified here
});
$table.stupidtable();

Listed below are the available settings.

will_manually_build_table

(Introduced in verison 1.1.1)

Options:

• true
• false (default)

By default, every time a column is sorted, stupidtable reads the DOM to extract all the values from the table. For tables that will not change or for very large tables, this behavior may be suboptimal. To modify this behavior, set the will_manually_build_table setting to true. However, you will be responsible for informing stupidtable that the table has been modified by calling $table.stupidtable_build().

var $table = $("#mytable");
$table.stupidtable_settings({
    will_manually_build_table: true
});
$table.stupidtable();

// Make some modification to the table, such as deleting a row
...
...

// Since will_manually_build_table is true, we must build the table in order
// for future sorts to properly handle our modifications.
$table.stupidtable_build();

should_redraw

(Introduced in verison 1.1.0)

The should_redraw setting allows you to specify a function that determines whether or not the table should be redrawn after it has been internally sorted.

The should_redraw function takes a sort_info object as an argument. The object keys available are:

• column - An array representing the sorted column. Each element of the array is of the form [sort_val, $tr, index]
• sort_dir - "asc" or "desc"
• $th - The jquery object of the <th> element that was clicked
• th_index - The index of the <th> element that was cliked
• $table - The jquery object of the <table> that contains the <th> that was clicked
• datatype - The datatype of the column
• compare_fn - The sort/compare function associated with the <th> clicked.

Example: If you want to prevent stupidtable from redrawing the table if the column sorted has all identical values, you would do the following:

var $table = $("#mytable");
$table.stupidtable_settings({
    should_redraw: function(sort_info){
      var sorted_column = sort_info.column;
      var first_val = sorted_column[0];
      var last_val = sorted_column[sorted_column.length - 1][0];

      // If first and last element of the sorted column are the same, we
      // can assume all elements are the same.
      return sort_info.compare_fn(first_val, last_val) !== 0;
    }
});
$table.stupidtable();

License

The Stupid jQuery Plugin is licensed under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for full details.

Tests

Visit tests/test.html in your browser to run the QUnit tests.