Feedback on EditRowPlugin

EditTablePlugin just dies with large tables on FF, and I needed a better in-place table editing solutuion.

I had to write this because I couldn't make EditTablerowPlugin work (none of the downloadable code wants to run for me) and it's not an in-place edit anyway.

Also, it was about time someone bit the bullet and created some reusable table management classes.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 12 Mar 2007

Thanks Crawford for sharing this plugin with the community! Useful if you want to change a few things in a table; more time consuming if you want to edit many rows at a time.

In regards to documentation: "At this time most, but possibly not all, features of EditTablePlugin are supported; it's hard to tell exactly, because there are no tests for EditTablePlugin, the documentation is incomplete and the code is rather hard to read." Could you let us know what the purpose is of this statement is? How does this help us move forward? I have a hard time to see a point besides sniping at the orignal author, especially if you compare this with the actual documentation of EditRowPlugin, which is exactly one line long: "See EditTablePlugin for information on the %EDITTABLE tag and its parameters."

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Mar 2007

Sorry Peter, I was rather tetchy after a long day at the coal face. I wasted a lot of time in the EditTablePlugin code, trying to understand and reverse engineer it, and was getting a bit frustrated at it. It's not fair of me, I know, and I withdraw the comment unreservedly.

The reason for the reference to the EditTablePlugin documentation was deliberate; I want to keep the syntax of the supported EDITTABLE tag identical, so that the two plugins can slot in to replace each other.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 13 Mar 2007

Thanks Crawford, this is exactly the kind of thing I have been looking for. For some tables I look after in place editing is exactly what is needed.

So I downloaded, installed and then tweaked the Plugin to

1. - fix a bug with textarea. The text wasn't appearing in edit mode
2. - added an anchor tag so when in a large table the edit jumps to the right place
3. - enabled support for a tag EDITROW which doesn't look up the ENABLE_TABLE_ROW_EDIT setting. This allows editable and editrow tables to be mixed within a single web. Something I will need as I will only be migrating select tables to editrow.

See attached patch file https://twiki.org/p/pub/Plugins/EditRowPluginDev/editrow-some-ideas.patch

-- PatrickDiamond - 13 Mar 2007

Patrick, many thanks! I had already added the anchor tag, but the textarea fix is very welcome. I can't say I'm too enamoured of the EDITROW idea. The whol point was to make this interchangeable with EditTablePlugin over the same data, and rewriting the tags to EDITROW breaks that. The enable setting can be set only in individual topics to allow selective override of EditTablePlugin; that's why I did it that way. Any other ideas for how to do this?

-- CrawfordCurrie - 13 Mar 2007

The plugin don't work with Konqueror ;-(

-- CarlinhosCecconi - 13 Mar 2007

I can't imagine why; it uses all the same HTML as the EditTablePlugin, and doesn't use Javascript. Can you be more specific?

-- CrawfordCurrie - 14 Mar 2007

This is a very useful. I could never get Edittablerowplugin to work on very big tables. This one does! Unfortunately, the sort by column is no longer activated. Is there a way to switch this back on?

-- JohnFitzpatrick - 16 Mar 2007

Crawford, the documentation says that the "initial value" feature is not supported, but later the documentation gives examples of initial values. Are you refering to the initial value in a cell of a newly added row? Without being able to give values, that would be a big shortcoming of this very promising plugin. Please advise.

-- ThomasWeigert - 09 Apr 2007

I don't understand your comment above regarding EditTablerowPlugin: " had to write this because I couldn't make EditTablerowPlugin work (none of the downloadable code wants to run for me) ". We are using this plugin just about everywhere and do not experience any difficulty. I am really puzzled by you saying that this does not run for you. I could understand that you don't like how it works, but it not running?

-- ThomasWeigert - 09 Apr 2007

Crawford, there is a lot of overlap between EditRowPlugin and the original EditTablePlugin. To conserve precious resources maintaining code, I think it would be best to merge these plugins by adding all features of EditTablePlugin to EditRowPlugin, then replacing EditTablePlugin with EditRowPlugin.

-- PeterThoeny - 10 Apr 2007

Sandbox.EditTablePluginTesting has a number of tables to test compatibility.

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Apr 2007

Thanks Peter, those tests are helpful. Unfortunately there are a few features of the EditTablePlugin that I won't be adding to the EditRowPlugin, for a number of reasons:

1. The EDITCELL functionality is never used on any TWiki I have access to, so I don't see the point, especially as it would be hard to add.
2. The "New Values" functionality just doesn't fit with the way the EditRowPlugin works
3. The various control twiki variables defined in the plugin topic of the EditTablePlugin are not going to be supported (I'm working on the KISS principle with this plugin)
4. The EditRowPlugin will never work on earlier TWiki releases (before 4.0)

So the EditRowPlugin will probably remain a subset of the EditTablePlugin functionality - at least until someone picks up the ball and implements the pieces that are missing.

Thomas, I was able eventually to get the EditTablerowPlugin to run, after a struggle (I just didn;t work at first), but I realised that it didn't work for the application that I had. the client wanted in-place row editing, which I initially thought it delivered. My bad. on the initial values feature; the EditTablePlugin has the capability to define initial values for rows that are added to the table, via the =<initial values> field of the row spec. I didn't add this because at first, this plugin only did row editing, and new rows took their initial values from the row they were copied from. Since I added full table editing, this is no longer the case; I have raised and enhancement request accordingly.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 12 Apr 2007

Great plugin! I have just a few improvement requests.

• Can you change the defaults for changerows and quietsave back to 'on' and also support the preference variables CHANGEROWS and QUIETSAVE like in EditTablePlugin?
• Can you fix the format so you can use assigned variables in a select? (e.g.) | select, 1, %<nop>LOW%, %<nop>MEDIUM%, %<nop>HIGH% | See EditTablePluginTesting "Example using vars". I've tried this technique, but the plugin translates the select options into the images instead of just , %MEDIUM%,
• Also a nice to have item would being able to delete multiple rows at once when editing the entire table (e.g. a column of checkboxes could be added in front of each row).

-- JeffCrawford - 30 Apr 2007

I just added a release with support for vertical row editing (a la EditTablerowPlugin) and QUIETSAVE and CHANGEROWS defaults. It also has a Javascript column sorting module which is loads faster than the equivalent TablePlugin functionality.

Jeff, I don't understand your point 2. I don't feel any pressing requirement to address point 3, but if anyone wanted to provide a documented patch, I would consider it.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 01 May 2007

Hi Crawford, For point 2, in the example on EditTablePluginTesting (goto the table marked "Example using vars") you can edit the table, and in the select dropdown you see ,, , and %VERYHIGH% as options for the Priority field. If you look at the raw text to see the format field in the edittable you see | select, 1, %<nop>LOW%, %<nop>NORMAL%, %<nop>HIGH%, %VERYHIGH% |. When I try the same thing with this plugin the variables are being rendered instead of being escaped, so the drop down shows some empty lines. Hope that makes sense.

-- JeffCrawford - 01 May 2007

Fantastic plugin. The Javascript sorting is not properly ignoring the header row for me, and I have tried enabling headerislabel if that makes a difference. Ideally, this plugin would support headers and footers, or respect the settings from TablePlugin (especially for those of us using SpreadSheetPlugin calculations in footer rows).

Column management similar to the row management (insert here, reorder) would be insanely great, by the way.

-- EshanShahJahan - 02 May 2007

A couple more notes: a line break in a textarea breaks the table layout. They should be supported or removed. When I set orientrowedit="vertical" the labels did not appear next to the form fields. Finally, javascript sorting messes up the alternating colors of the table rows (very minor).

-- EshanShahJahan - 02 May 2007

Please provide testcases. I can't fix what I can't see

-- CrawfordCurrie - 02 May 2007

Hi Crawford, here is a simple test case for point 2 I mentioned above

   * Set LOW = %ICON{hand}%
   * Set NORMAL = %ICON{stargold}%
   * Set HIGH = %ICON{starred}%

%EDITTABLE{ changerows="on" format="|select,1, %<nop>LOW%, %<nop>NORMAL%, %<nop>HIGH%|"}% 
| *Priority* |
| %NORMAL% |
| %NORMAL% |
| %LOW% |
| %HIGH% |
| %LOW% |
| %LOW% |

-- JeffCrawford - 02 May 2007

Here is a test cast for the issues I mentioned. Javascript sort include the headers and doesn't recolor. Vertical row editing doesn't show the labels and if you enter a value with line breaks into the textarea, it breaks the table.

%EDITTABLE{ changerows="on" orientrowedit="vertical" format="| text, 20 | text, 20 | textarea, 2x20 |" }% 
| *First* | *Last* | *Life Story* |
| John | Doe |  |
| Jane | Smith |  |
| Rob | Jones |  |
| Will | Black |  |
| Susan | Anderson |  |

-- EshanShahJahan - 02 May 2007

This excellent plugin seems to break RackPlannerPlugin, maybe (or vice versa). Standard EditTablePlugin seems to work fine with RackPlannerPlugin. We're using mod_perl.

-- LarsEik - 07 May 2007

Hi Crawford, you can ignore the bug re using variables in the select box. Seems to be a problem in 4.0.1. I've been playing with 4.1.2 and it appears to work fine.

-- JeffCrawford - 08 May 2007

Lars, you are going to have to be more informative than that. "seems to break" isn't a very useful report.....

-- CrawfordCurrie - 08 May 2007

I cannot get RackPlannerPlugin to work with this plugin. I get only empty racks, but if only the EditTablePlugin is active it works. I believe only one of EditTable/EditRow plugins need to be active, there's no saying about that afaiks. Anyway I have tried all options I can think of in configure.

-- LarsEik - 08 May 2007

Great plugin, this should be part of standard TWiki!

-- MikkoLaakso - 03 Jul 2007

Mikko, this plugin currently implements a subset of the EditTablePlugin, and it uses the variable namespace of that plugin. Therefore we can't package this with the TWiki release.

I would like to re-iterate: To conserve precious resources maintaining code, it would be best to merge the edit table plugins by adding all features of EditTablePlugin to EditRowPlugin, then replacing the EditTablePlugin code with the one from EditRowPlugin. Cairo compatibility is no longer an issue, 1.5 years after TWiki 4 release.

-- PeterThoeny - 14 Jul 2007

I missed an EDITCELL feature, so I started to code. Havent reached my goal but implemented an EDITTABLEROW feature. (Diff against #14418 and example picture attached.) I use it in a popup window and throw the output against the rest save script. Maybe anybody find it useful.

-- OliverKrueger - 16 Jul 2007

---

2 problems to report:

1. The column containing the row editing icons seems to become a "real" table column and throws off the alignment settings. Unfortunately, it's not so simple just to pre-pend e.g. a "center" alignment for this "pseudo-column" since those without edit authority for a page, don't see this edit row column and the alignments are then wrong for THEM.
2. In order to avoid editing of the header row (which is important to prevent "select" format columns from clobbering actual headers) I've added headerislabel="on", but then note how the "row" format column is then incorrectly numbered starting with a row number of 0 (instead of 1).

%TABLE{ headeralign="center,left" dataalign="center,left" }%
%EDITTABLE{ format="|row,-1|text,60|" headerislabel="on" }%
| *Item* | *Description* |
| 1 | This should have row number 1 and be left justified  |
| 2 | And this should have row number 2 |

• On our site:

• On this site:

-- StevenElliot - 25 Jul 2007

---

I think I could really get to like this pplugin, but there is one preference I would dearly love to have. The default behaviour of EditRowPlugin is to dramatically change the look anmd feel of edittable tables. I'd like a preference that makes this considerably less dramatic. For example, under this preference, the button below the table woould look exactly like an unmodified EditTable button and, after cllicking, the table editing buttons would also look exactly as expected.

It doesn't matter if row editing has a different GUI; row editing is new. But it should be possible (and easy) to make full table editing look almost exactly the same, with or without EditRowPlugin.

-- VickiBrown - 22 Aug 2007

Crawford - The JS sort is doing us the unwanted favor of preferentially sorting numeric portions of string fields (eg putting EF.001 before AA.098). Can we force it to simply read from the beginning of the string?

-- PhilStevens - 13 Sep 2007

-- BinurajRavindran - 18 Sep 2007

I tried to install EditRowPlugin on our server and enabled the plugin using the "configure" page. However, this EditRowPlugin is not shown in the list of InstalledPlugins. I can see the edit button for the above given example. If try to edit the rows, I can neither edit nor can I see any of the buttons like "save table", "add row" etc etc. I tried reinstalling a couple of time without any luck. Any thoughts on this? I tried disabling the EditTablePlugin as well.

-- BinurajRavindran - 18 Sep 2007

I was wondering if anyone can help with this problem - TWiki 4.1.2, Sat, 03 Mar 2007, build 13046 using the ChartPlugin and the EditRowPlugin. Within the one topic, if I have a table with an EDITTABLE tag and then on the same line the TABLE tag with a name in it, then a Chart works fine...finds the table and graphs. However, if I then refer to this table in another topic (using the web= and topic= settings for the Chart), then it can't find the table --

parameter *table* is not valid table; the specified table '$tableName' does not exist. 

The only way I can get it to work is to disable the EditRowPlugin entirely from my twiki and move the tag to the beginning of the line ie.

%TABLE{name="blah"}%%EDITTABLE{...}%

instead of

%EDITTABLE{...}%%TABLE{name="blah"}%

Does anyone have any ideas what the EditRowPlugin might be doing to the handling of table names that confuses things?

-- SallyHoughton - 03 Oct 2007

During edit with verbatim, "<!--verbatim7-->" not restore to original content(i.e., "int i = 1;") for normal editing.

%EDITTABLE{ headerislabel = "on" header="|*Num* | *Code* |" format="| text, 8 | textarea, 10x40 |" changerows="on" }%
| *Num* | *Code* |
| 1 | <verbatim>
int i = 1;
</verbatim> |
| 2 | <verbatim>
int n = 1;
</verbatim> |

-- RouterHsu - 18 Oct 2007

For some reason "Edit row" button does not require user to authenticate, contrary to "Edit table" button. Setting DENYWEBCHANGE = TWikiGuest is not very convenient, because it hides possibility to edit table directly.

-- LaimisJacinavicius - 18 Oct 2007

This plugin has the same features as EditTablePlugin but it is not a replacement. The settings are not the same. A default EDITTABLE in EditTablePlugin allows adding rows. The EditRowPlugin does not. etc.

But really bugs me is that I cannot both use EditTablePlugin and EditRowPlugin because they both use the EDITTABLE tag.

Couldn't this plugin be made to recognize EDITROW instead of EDITTABLE so the two could live side by side making the transistion from EditTablePlugin to EditRowPlugin smooth?

I have maybe 1000 topics with EDITTABLE now and just changing the plugin breaks the function of 900 of them which is why I am stuck with the old EditTablePlugin.

-- KennethLavrsen - 19 Oct 2007

I may sound like a broken record: Let's use the little resources we have wisely. We cannot afford to maintain two very similar plugins/plugins that serve the same use cases. Suggestion: Enhance the EditRowPlugin with the functionality of the EditTablePlugin (including a switch that makes it look as simple as the EditTablePlugin), then retire EditTablePlugin and replace it with the code and doc of EditRowPlugin.

-- PeterThoeny - 19 Oct 2007

Some points of clarification:

• Enhance the EditRowPlugin with the functionality of the EditTablePlugin - to the best of my knowledge, the EditRowPlugin is (at the time of writing) a superset of the EditTablePlugin.
• IMHO the fact that the EditTablePlugin ignores the documented behaviour of the changerows switch is a bug in the EditTablePlugin, not a shortcoming of the EditRowPlugin.
• including a switch that makes it look as simple as the EditTablePlugin it's a matter of opinion which is simpler. Personally I find the EditTablePlugin row management interface counter-intuitive and clumsy, and IMHO it makes excessively heavy use of Javascript.
• I have never positioned EditRowPlugin as a replacement for EditTablePlugin. I simply needed a way to edit rows in-place on very large tables, for a client who was already making heavy use of EDITTABLE, and it was significantly easier to start again than to try and refactor EditTablePlugin. If someone wants to pick up the banner of "enhancing" EditRowPlugin to be the same as EditTablePlugin I am more than happy to help them as best I can, or even do the work on a contract basis, as long as their changes don't compromise the original requirements that drove EditRowPlugin (I owe a duty of care to the client who funded it).
• The EditTablePlugin now has unit tests, and Arthur has done a lot of work on the codebase. AFAIK the only feature of the EditRowPlugin that is missing is the ability to edit single rows, one at a time. If that feature was added to the EditTablePlugin, then I would be quite happy to retire the EditRowPlugin.

Note to people who are reporting bugs here; please report bugs in the TWiki bugs system.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 20 Oct 2007

Hm, is it possible to create an URL that views a topic in edittable mode, thus making it possible to start editing e.g. the first table on that topic via a link?

-- FranzJosefGigler - 16 Dec 2007

Yes: add ?erp_active_table=1;erp_active_row=-1 to the url (before any # sign) in the url string.

It's always good to read Plugin topics very thorough.

-- FranzJosefGigler - 17 Dec 2007

How compatible is this plugin now compared to the EditTablePlugin? If all functionality is covered I suggest to replace the codebase of EditTablePlugin with the one of this plugin, e.g. retire the codebase of the EditTablePlugin. We (spececially Crawford and Arthur) spend too many precious cycles maintaining two plugins that do essentially the same.

-- PeterThoeny - 02 Jan 2008

I just had a customer request for this plugin so we brought it into our 4.1.2 test environment. While I like the ability to edit a single row I had to wave off implementation due to the substantial negative impact we would incur to existing tables.

I am most certainly not diss'ing the plugin's goal - Crawford made it very clear his intended deliverables. But as a wholesale replacement for an existing site with many tables the potential table re-formatting and subsequent customer impact would be huge.

I also understand the desire to make efficient use of precious resources - but in this case I believe using the same tag is a mistake - this plugin often requires migrating existing tables.

Please note that my above comments are targeting the idea of a drop-in replacement with NO formating changes

-- SteveRJones - 07 Jan 2008

I think the functionality also includes usability. So, if this plugin can be enhanced to be a superset of the EditTablePlugin with same/better usability and no conversion issues we can merge the plugins as I described earlier.

-- PeterThoeny - 08 Jan 2008

I just test the plugin. When i add a new line, there are no spaces at both sides of the text or smily.( |:-)|hello|) With no spaces, twiki don't show me the smily or symbol. The right form is, spaces on both sides like this example-> | | hello | Is this a problem with the plugin?

-- PaulBraun - 21 Jan 2008

I am using the editrow plug-in as I require a table which has a totals row at the bottom and therefore requires the bottom row to be defined as a footer. I found out the hard way that the standard edittable wipes out %CALC formulas and puts new rows after the totals row.

When I edit my table I am unable to alter the header or footer rows as expected. However, on saving the table the contents of the footer row is wiped. My test code is as follows:

What I am left with after a save is:

Is this a bug or expected behaviour?

-- NickMilner - 23 Jan 2008

When I INCLUDE a page with a edittabel, the editcell index have change. for example, R2:C2 changed to R2:C3. Is it a bug?

-- YangZilie - 27 May 2008

It would be great to have possibility to move a row from one table to another (save a row to other table) if there are several tables in a topic.

-- TarasPlakhotnichenko - 02 Jun 2008

This is a GREAT plugin. I plan to use it in place of EditTablePlugin. But there is ONE thing which prevents me from doing so. In the EditTablePlugin, with headerislabel set to on, I could prevent people from editing ANY cell by just making the cell contents bold (by enclosing the contents in *). But the EditRowPlugin considers only the first row as the label (when headerislabel is set to on). If a formula (like %CALC{"$SUM( $ABOVE() )"}%) or a variable (like %MYVARIABLE%) is used, the plugin displays the result in the edit window. When the table is saved, the formula is lost. This was the problem in EditTable plugin too. I had circumvented it by making the cell bold in EditTablePlugin, thus preventing it to be edited by others. Is there any solution to this in EditRowPlugin ?

Secondly, it looks like the 'headerislabel' parameter can not be set in TwikiPreferences (It has to be set within the EDITTABLE{}). Am I right ?

-- ChengappaCB - 08 Jul 2008

One odd problem here (only manifests itself when using Internet Explorer, specifically IE 6).

Make a table with several rows, save the topic, etc. Now delete, let's say, the top row. The row that used to be second becomes first and is highlighted. Clicking the save button now results in this row being erased (but not deleted), losing the data that was in there.

Interestingly enough, doesn't happen with Firefox; but since IE6 is mandated here, it's a major bummer...

Any clues?

-- SergeiKlink - 09 Jul 2008

Chengappa and Sergei, probably best to file bug reports, see link on top

-- PeterThoeny - 16 Jul 2008

Filed a bug report.

-- ChengappaCB - 20 Jul 2008

Thanks to the answer given by FranzJosefGigler at http://develop.twiki.org/~twiki4/cgi-bin/view/Bugs/Item5797. Selected cells can be made as read-only. Thank you.

-- ChengappaCB - 26 Aug 2008

Send bug report: Some Russian chars converted to 'qestion-square' symbol in topic

And this EditRowPlugin have some conflict with RackPlannerPlugin(its not show rack modules by javascript).

-- VictorKasatkin - 29 Sep 2008

http://develop.twiki.org/~twiki4/cgi-bin/view/Bugs/Item6029

-- VictorKasatkin - 29 Sep 2008

Hm, the documentation states:

TablePlugin

Javascript sorting in EditRowPlugin is much faster than TablePlugin. However TablePlugin has many features this plugin does not support. The two plugins can safely be used together.

---

• How do I use that somehow hidden sorting feature?
  • Ah, now I see, just click the column headers and the table gets sorted. To bad no sorting indicators are shown (yet )
• Using the TablePlugin features initsort or columnwidths I may get very unexpected results cause EditRowPlugin doesn't turn off the sorting of TablePlugin while editing.

-- FranzJosefGigler - 23 Oct 2008

Hi, I hope I'm posting in the right place. I'm trying to use EditRowPlugin to create a table that has a column set as radio. The options shuold be icon, just as the popular example with smilies. The only difference is I want to use my own icons. The problem I'm having is that when I go to edit mode, the options are not rendered as images, but showed as HTML text... Any hint? I would like to define in WebPreferences some variables like RED_BALL_ICON, GREEN_BALL_ICON, YELLOW_BALL_ICON and then use them in the table definition, like

%EDITTABLE{ format="| . . . | radio, 3, %RED_BALL_ICON%, %GREEN_BALL_ICON%, %YELLOW_BALL_ICON% | ... }

I also tried using taking icons from twiki.org, but it didn't work...

I'm not a developer, but I would like to report this behaviour which I'm not sure is a bug or bad usage..

-- ThomasFozzi - 2012-12-06