Creating a table-like grid without using table - html

Please see my awesome graphic below which is neither too scale or complete. BUT, I wanted to show the structure I'm going for instead of describing it.
I am creating a space rental system wherein a calendar, structured similarly to the below image, both shows the "taken" spots and also allows a user to click an "open" slot to reserve it themselves. I don't need help with the functionality though, just the layout.
Since this is tabular data at it's finest, with headers and everything, I was able to easily create the desired layout that way. However, tables render from left to right, so in the example below, it renders SPACE 1 9:00am, SPACE 2 9:00am, SPACE 3 9:00am, etc. I need it to actually render SPACE 1 9:00am, SPACE 1 10:00am, etc.
The reason is that in order to make each reservation into a "block" represented by the blue squares below, I need to be able to loop through the columns vertically and not through the rows horizontally.
I also want the columns to be a consistent width and be flexible if more spaces are added or if one/some are removed down the road.
I've been playing with flexbox, which I've barely used before, and I'm having no luck at all. I'm not even sure that's the right direction.
My question would be either 1) is there a way to get a standard table to load the way I want or 2) how can I do this without tables?

Maybe bootstrap's grid system will fit your needs. http://getbootstrap.com/css/
You can create a grid like structure by adding columns, up to 12 in a row, and locking those into rows.

Related

SSRS - Adding empty cells under a tablix to fill empty spaces on the page (if any)

I work with ssrs with a dynamic row data in matrix/tablix. There is possibility when I have more than one page (say it two pages) where the data just fill half of the second page and leave a blank space below (half page blank space on the second page). How is the way to fill this blank space with empty rows? (whether rendering empty rows in the tablix, or inserting background image, or anything. I don't have any solution yet as it is dynamic data with many possibilities of the blank space size on the page)
Unfortunately there aren't any settings in the reporter that support this behavior. There are however several workarounds you could use to get the wanted result.
[1]
You could determine the amount of rows that fit on the first page and on the second page, just in case you have items above the
table on the first page. Before you send the datasource to the
reporter count the total rows and check if it exceeds the first page.
Then calculate the number of rows missing to fill an entire second
page (or third/fourth... if you ever get more data). Finally you add
empty rows/objects at the end of your datasource, which will of cource
cause the pages to be filled to the end.
As was pointed out before, this solution is only possible when working
with fixed row heights. If certain columns can have multi-line cells
then these could be checked as well and taken in account when
calculating the number of rows being displayed on the page. This makes
it slightly more complicated but is still a valid solution if you can
predict which columns might be troublesome.
[2]
A second solution would be to hide the table borders and place the table inside a rectangle that spans the maximum size of the
page. The borders of this rectangle can be used to display the table
outer borders and columns can be displayed by adding lines inside the
rectangle. This will cause the columns to fill the last page of the
report automatically. Unfortunately this isn't a solution to display
horizontal grid lines.
[3]
A third approach is adding an extra table directly below your table
with the same size of columns. Using the same method as from the first
solution you could fill the second table to represent the empty rows.
You'll probably have the same issue as with the first solution when
dealing with multi-line rows though.
I believe solution [1] and [3] will offer the most exact solution, if you're willing to do the math. If you don't want any horizontal lines then I suggest using approach [2].
Using an image to overlay the borders is of course another option but then you'll have the same issues when dealing with the multi-line rows. If you plan on working with fixed row heights, where you leave space for multi-line cells then this is becomes a valid approach but so does solutions [1] and [3].
Update:
If you only need the filled pages for printing you could make sure you add enough empty rows to fill at least the entire last page, these may go to a new page (1 new page, not 2... you can use a simple calculated guess for this) and exclude the last page when printing.

how to make a form designer

The Problem in Hand:
I want to make a form designer where user can drag and drop fields of different type and design the layout too, some what similar to wufoo form builder but here the layout is limited to single column whereas I want to make something where user can make the layout as they want.
I understand how to do in single column view, but could not understand how to achieve multiple column layout eg: row 1 there could be 3 elements, row 2 one element stretched to full length, row 3 there could be just 2 elements etc.
What I tried:
I have tried with jquery UI sortable to make a single column layout with using div where new elements can be dragged and repositioned.
Any suggestion on how to proceed further will be helpful
I have tried searching StackOverFlow and google but could not find any link on a similar topic. If anyone could point me to the same, it will be also helpful.
When you reorder elements on wufoo form builder, you can only drag'n'drop up or down. Remove that restriction and as soon as one element is dragged across a certain threshold, it "belongs" to the next column. If the "old" column was the first or last one and the line that the element was moved over was to the "outside" of the form, add a new column there, until the maximal number of columns is reached.
If the used drags the last element of a column into another column, remove the now empty column on element-drop.
You could also remove the dynamic adding/removing of columns and juist have a button ("remove column" & "add column") to do it by code.
An example for the dropping in another column can be found here: http://jqueryui.com/sortable/#connect-lists
Hope this helped!
Edit:
http://jqueryui.com/sortable/#portlets and http://jqueryui.com/sortable/#empty-lists also have elements that you could look into. Good luck! Sounds like a nice project. Can we see any progress or beta?

HTML table with raised column effect

I've got a bit of a challenge with an HTML table that we need to have raised columns. If you look at the attached image you'll see what I mean.
The purpose of these raised columns is to draw the user's attention to them.
The problem is:
To get the effect of the column raising above the other columns you
need some kind of element/height/margin to appear outside the
boundary of the table, which doesn't seem to work
Same goes for the bottom
To have the drop shadow appear correctly, it needs to be applied to all the cells in a column.
We did get this to work by splitting it up into multiple tables then applying the styles to the table that should be the raised column. The image I've attached is actually a live table working like this.
But, you loose all other needed features of tables...
Row heights don't match if the text wraps in table 1 but not in
table 2.
To deal with the row height issue we applied a fixed height to each table's rows, but then you have to force text to not wrap. If you then get text that's longer than the width you run into trouble.
Does anyone know how this can be achieved without splitting the tables?
Thanks,
jacques
Try having an extra row for the table above the header row (you may have to stop using any th tags) to give you the overbar at the top. Similarly for the bottom, an extra highlighting row.
Although you have to compromise the table a little to do that, it is better in my book than separating into 2 tables, as that defeats all the purposes of the table tag; to show a table, and have that table easily declared.
The effects inside the table are probably best done with jquery, unless the choice of highlighted columns is entirely static, in which case consider rendering a static html version by generating the html appropriately.

How do I make a table like this?

http://weknowwhatyouredoing.com/
I'm trying to make a table like this one where I have a profile image to the left, a bold title/name and text underneath the bold title/name, and date/time stamp underneath that... basically the same views as on that website (http://weknowwhatyouredoing.com/) or better (or twitter tweets).
Anybody know of any tutorials on how accomplish this? I'm currently using table with multiple columns but it seems that when one cell is big, all the cells in that row become the same height and i don't like that. In android this is called a list view but i'm not sure what it is in the html/css world, any help please? Thanks in advance
You could make multiple tables floating next to each other. The elements on the website you show aren't aligned as fa as I can tell.
A tutorial on rowspan and colspan can be found here.
If you make the image span 3 rows, you can put the bold text, content and date stamp each into one row. With valign you can vertically position elements within a row if the row becomes higher than the content. This will probably happen if the 3 rows together are higher than the one spanning row containing the image.
As a quick fix for your issue with the equal row heights, you could use the same layout method as they use on weknowwhatyouredoing.com.
Wrap each column in a separate <div>, and then place your <table> inside.
4 containers, 4 tables with independent row heights.
You shall give a look at the Twitter Bootstrap CSS library Twitter Bootstrap
It's pure HTML5/CSS using only divs.
for improve your knowleges in HTML, you can see W3C (Word Wibe Web Consortium) specs. For sample, if you see this page, W3C explain all structure, attributes, for Table element.
You can find lot of tutorial in google ( search "tutorial create Table HTML" ).
Also, you can help you to understand website structure with browser plugins that display hover element in specific website. ( firebug for Firefox and Chrome, Dragonfly for Opera browser...)
Why not use multiple list elements? Tables definitely don't give you flexibility for responsive designs. Making multiple columns of list elements can be rearranged as needed with limited restrictions

Dynamically Populate Content Within Un-Orthodox Grid

I'm currently developing out a blog page with a 3 X 3 grid layout for content to fall into the different boxes (see attached example).
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/337/cssex.jpg/
The content blocks in the lighter gray are meant to be stationary, so any updated, recently added, etc. content will not affect these boxes, only the black ones. I'm trying to figure out the best approach with keeping the gray boxes stationary, but allowing the black boxes to be populated dynamically (WordPress blog entries) and floating naturally through the layout.
As of now, I'm thinking that each individual black box will query the recent post that aligns to it. So, the first black box would query the most recent post, the second black box would query the second recent post and so on.
A big order!
Here is the general idea to help get you going:
You need to make those blocks a <div> or <section> with an ID tag like this:
<section id=brief1>
(BTW, you can also use a "table" & merge cells to get that layout, just ensure you use an ID)
Then you need find a script to update the innerHTML using straight JavaScript, or a JS library like jQuery, MooTools, etc. This will allow you to inject text &/or an image inside those boxes. Example search: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+update+innerHTML+div
Once you have 1 spot updated with text, it is time to edit that script. Make an array of our ID tags, then loop though all of them to insert new content one at a time.
Good luck! If I see something pre-rolled on my travels, I'll update this thread.