How to avoid blinking when updating page from ajax - html

I've got a table with a header, a row with input fields, rows with data. Like this. http://brow.hu/sitegen/stackoverflow_table_example.png
If somebody enters something into an input field I want to filter the data with an ajax query. After receiving the new table I change the content of the old one: div.innerHTML = req.responseText; and it blinks. How to avoid that?

One way to avoid flicker is called double-buffering. In Ajax, this can be done simply with 2 divs occupying the same space, one of them with the style 'display: none', the other 'display: inline'. Always write to the invisible one, and then swap display styles. If the divs have absolute positioning and size, there is absolutely no chance for flicker, and even if they don't, you can hardly do better.

It blinks because you're completely replacing the table ... if you add rows to or delete rows from the existing table and then load your AJAX data into the resulting table it won't blink.

Related

Displaying a lot of text in tables

I have a table, this table gets data from a server, and has a few fields,
The data from the server is plain text, but no limit on how many characters.
The table should not be over 900px wide.
View example
As you can see in my plunker some texts gets very long, so they take several rows, while some fit on the first row.
In my opinion, this is not readable at all, it's horrific.
And here's the real problem, since this should be printed some time, all text must be visible.
I have tried fooling around with some fixed tables and overflow: hidden properties, though this does make the table more attractive, a lot of text would be litterly unreadable
Basically what I am asking is if there are any tried methods for displaying (maybe) a lof of texts in tables, and have it readable?
Edit: Okey, as it seems this is the way to do it, there can be some stylig done, but nothing major. There's is one thing that bothers me though, and that's that the title field (field1) is pushed to the left so much.
I know I can set width, but that requires the table to be fixed, and that will cause problems, I need the table to be as dynamic as possible.
Is it possible to set priortiy on which cells the table will break words on first? So that maybe field 1 and 5 have a low priority, so those cells will be less likely to have line breaks?
The ideal solution, and the solution I have used in most of the projects i've done is to add a modal.
For example, if you have a pragraph of texts, the best thing to do it to display a few words and then add a View more button which will open up a modal which will display the entire paragraph.
You can also try to add a View button in the end of each row in another column. Clicking this would open a modal which shows all the data in that row entirely.
This way you can show some information in the table without making it ugly and also provide all the details in the table itself(although its not present in the table view).
It looks fine to me as well, although you may try alternating row colors... add the following rule to your css... you can of course change the color to whatever you like. I find it improves readability:
tbody tr:nth-child(odd) {
background: #eee;
}

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.

Is it possible to set a title attribute for a whole column within an html table?

Consider a really big html table.
If I want to have the same tooltip for every column in all rows I could set the title attribute for every single <td> tag. I wonder if there is a better way to this with html since this is a load of redundant data and increases the document size. Needs to work only in newest Chrome/Firefox.
If there is nothing like this I guess I could use Javascript to this, but I want to be sure first, that there is no other way.
Have you considered putting the title attribute onto the table itself? That way you effectively have a title attribute for all the TDs.
If you're wanting to try and avoid giving it to the THs, you can get away with altering the TH to have a title of " ", and that as far as I can tell gets rid of the unwanted title tag.
I've only tested this in Firefox though, I'm unsure if it'll work as you want in Chrome.

Three divs, content from one div goes to another

I need to create three divs, next to each other (attribute float:left).
Then I read the data from database and I need to present this data in three divs, in such a way that I first fill up the first div, line by line and when I reach certain height, I go to the next div and fill it with data, and so on.
This is something like reverse table, that is I first fill the first column in first row then go to second and so on until the end of the row, then I move to the second column of first row
and so on. I hope you get the picture.
Is there a way to achieve this in CSS or in some other way?
This functionality is available in CSS3 using column-count and column-span.
I do not know how to make it efficient, but it should be possible with javascript... you know the line-height, you check the height of first div with all content, then you truncate it to desired size and the rest put to the next div.. repeat.. but this looks odd.. ?
You might be able to do this by requesting the first 30 results in the database in one column, then request the next 30 in the next div, and so on. I can't see it being possible in CSS 2.1 alone.

Table data causing horizontal scroll

I've got a table on a webpage, with (say) 8 columns, and it's worked just fine until recently...
A user registered with an email address for a display name (not a huge issue, but the email is massive). Now, as one of the columns is a 'reported by' containing username, any pages with said user on them now have a massive 'reported by' column...
I should also emphasise, the table width was 100% (minus a 'margin') prior to this issue, and it worked just fine).
Is there a clever way to introduce a line break on a '.' or an '#'? Alternatively, how do people normally get around this? Interesting solutions to this annoying problem are welcomed!
When you generate your html table content code, truncate every content extracted from your database to a maximum width. Your truncating function can easily add a tooltip giving the full label.
Alternatively, do this in javascript on pageload. Parse every table cell and truncate the content if it's too large. It's not as nice as server-side truncating, though.
The upside is that you can give the full label in a tooltip, append '...' to let the user know the label is truncated, etc.
Use the table-layout css property.
table-layout: fixed;
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/tables.html#tablelayout
You could set a max-width on the column and overflow:scroll or even overflow:hidden.