svelte-simple-tables

• Features
• Examples
• Installation
• Usage
  • data
  • columnSettings
  • tableSettings
• Themes
  • CSS Custom Properties

Features

• Create sortable, paginated tables that follow WAI-ARIA guidelines.
• Columns dynamically resize to accommodate all visible content.
• Automatically responsive. Tables become horizontally scrollable without breaking page layout.
• Four color themes provided. Users can adjust every detail of existing themes or create new themes with CSS custom properties.

Examples

• svelte-simple-tables docs site
• Coming Soon: CSS Theme Editor

Installation

yarn

yarn add -D @a-luna/svelte-simple-tables

npm

npm install -D @a-luna/svelte-simple-tables

pnpm

pnpm install -D @a-luna/svelte-simple-tables

Usage

<script lang="ts">
	import SimpleTable from '@a-luna/svelte-simple-tables';
	import type { TableSettings } from '@a-luna/svelte-simple-tables/types';
	import { columnSettings } from './columnSettings';
	import type { VaxData } from './data';
	import { data } from './data';

	const tableSettings: TableSettings<VaxData> = {
		tableId: 'vax-status-table',
		themeName: 'darker',
		sortBy: 'age',
		sortDir: 'desc',
		showHeader: true,
		header: 'Vax Status',
		showSortDescription: true,
		tableWrapper: true,
		expandToContainerWidth: true,
		paginated: true,
		pageSize: 10,
		pageSizeOptions: [5, 10, 15, 20, 25],
		pageRangeFormat: 'compact',
		pageNavFormat: 'compact',
		rowType: 'vax records',
	};
</script>

<SimpleTable {data} {columnSettings} {tableSettings} />

SimpleTable expects three props: data, columnSettings, and tableSettings:

Name	Type	Description
data	T[]	Array of T objects (T is a generic type) . Each object will be rendered as a row in the table.
columnSettings	ColumnSettings<VaxData>[]	Array of ColumnSettings<VaxData> objects (T is the same generic type from data). You must define a ColumnSettings<VaxData> object for every column your table contains. Each ColumnSettings<VaxData> object specifies the value to display in the column for each row, the value to show in the column header, etc.
tableSettings	TableSettings<VaxData>	Configuration object for sizing, layout, pagination, and other overall table settings (Again, T is the same generic type from data).

data

The data for your table will typically be provided from a response to an API request or database query. In this example, data is imported from a typescript file (data.ts) that exports a list of VaxData objects:

// data.ts
interface VaxData {
	personId: number;
	name: string;
	age: number;
	birthdate: Date;
	vaccinated: boolean;
}

export const data: VaxData[] = [
	{
		personId: 1,
		name: 'Alice',
		age: 11,
		birthdate: new Date(2010, 7, 12),
		vaccinated: true,
	},
	...// contains 21 items, only showing first and last item for brevity
	{
		personId: 21,
		name: 'Ulysses',
		age: 85,
		birthdate: new Date(1936, 2, 12),
		vaccinated: true,
	},
];

😨 BUT I DON'T WANT TO USE TYPES Why is it necessary to specify the type of the items in the data array? SimpleTable uses an experimental svelte feature that makes it possible to use generic types with component props. This enables advanced error-checking and autocompletion in your IDE.

columnSettings

After you have the data that you wish to display in a table, the next step is to determine which VaxData properties (name, age, etc.) should be displayed in each column. This is accomplished with the columnSettings prop, which is a list of ColumnSettings<VaxData> objects. The API for ColumnSettings<VaxData> is given below:

Property	Type	Required	Default	Description
propName	keyof T	✅	N/A	The name of the property to display (value must be the name of a property on type T)
headerText	string	❌	If the value provided for propName is in snake_case or camelCase format, it is converted to Snake Case or Camel Case, respectively. Otherwise, the value provided for propName is used as the default value.	The text displayed in the column header.
tooltip	string	❌	Same behavior as headerText	Tooltip value to display when mouse hovers over the column header.
sortable	boolean	❌	true	If sortable=True, clicking the column header will re-sort the table using that value. Clicking the same column header again will toggle between ascending/descending order. If sortable=False, clicking the column header will have no effect.
classList	string[]	❌	[]	A list of strings where each string will be added to the classList of each data cell in this column. Useful for utility classes such as Tailwind to control text-alignment, font-weight, etc.
colValue	(obj: T) => string	❌	(obj: T) => obj.propName What does this do? The default behavior is to display the value of obj.propName without any further processing or formatting	A function that accepts an object from data and returns the value that should be displayed in this column. This allows you to customize the way the data is displayed in any way.

🚨AS OF VERSION 0.0.26 propType is no longer a property of ColumnSettings<T>. It is no longer necessary to define the type of each value to display as a column, this is automatically inferred for you.

For each column, the only required value is propName (all other properties have sane default values). Determining the value to use for colValue (other than the default) will be necessary quite often, since this controls the value that a column displays for each object.

Let's take a look at an example that renders a column for each VaxData property:

// columnSettings.ts
import type { ColumnSettings } from '@a-luna/svelte-simple-tables/types';
import type { VaxData } from './data';

export const columnSettings: ColumnSettings<VaxData>[] = [
	{
		propName: 'name',
		tooltip: 'First Name',
		colValue: (data: VaxData): string => `<a href="/person/${data.personId}">${data.name}</a>`,
	},
	{
		propName: 'birthdate',
		colValue: (data: VaxData): string => data.birthdate.toDateString(),
	},
	{
		propName: 'age',
	},
	{
		propName: 'vaccinated',
		headerText: 'Vax?',
		tooltip: 'Vaccination Status',
		classList: ['text-center'],
		colValue: (data: VaxData): string => (data.vaccinated ? '✅' : '❌'),
	},
	{
		propName: 'personId',
		headerText: 'ID',
		sortable: false,
	},
];

These five ColumnSettings<VaxData> objects would generate a table similar to the one below:

Name	Birthdate	Age	Vax?	ID
Alice	Thu Aug 12 2010	11	✅	1
...	...	...	...	...
Ulysses	Thu Mar 12 1936	85	✅	21

All of the explanations that follow refer to this table and the ColumnSettings<VaxData> objects defined above.

Example #1: Custom HTML

The first column is configured to display the name property of each object as a link to a hypothetical page. Since colValue is a function which accepts a single VaxData object and returns a string, we can easily construct an anchor element that incorporates properties of the VaxData object:

colValue: (data: VaxData): string => `<a href="/person/${data.personId}">${data.name}</a>`;

This string will be rendered using the special @html tag available in svelte, resulting in a clickable link as shown in the table above.

Example #2: Date value

The birthdate property is a Date value. If the default value for colValue is used, it would be displayed by simply calling the Date.toString() method (e.g., Thu Aug 12 2010 00:00:00 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)). By simply configuring colValue to instead call the Date.toDateString() method, the column will omit the time and time-zone information, displaying just the date portion (Thu Aug 12 2010):

colValue: (data: VaxData): string => data.birthdate.toDateString();

Example #3: Number value

The Age column is a good example of when the default behavior produces a result that doesn't require any further changes. The age property is a number, which will be rendered as a string eventually. Therefore, there is no need to customize colValue for this property.

Example #4: Boolean value

The column for vaccinated contains boolean values, which by default will simply display 'true'/'false' strings. The easiest way to display something more interesting is with a ternary operator:

colValue: (data: VaxData): string => (data.vaccinated ? '✅' : '❌');

This column also takes advantage of the classList property. In Tailwind CSS, text-center is a utility class that sets text-align: center on a HTML element. This would add the text-center class to each data cell in this column.

Example #5: Making a Column Unsortable

Finally, the last column displays the personId property. The sortable property is set to false, making this the only column that cannot be sorted by clicking on the column header.

♨️ HOT TIP You can define columnSettings in the <script> tag of your .svelte file, or in a separate .ts file as demonstrated here. If your table has a large number of columns, moving it to its own file will make your .svelte file easier to digest visually and make your component easier to maintain (IMO).

tableSettings

Strictly speaking, the final prop, tableSettings, isn't required. Without it, our table would be rendered like this:

That's a very nice table, I'm sure you will agree. However, by customizing the tableSettings prop, the same data and columnSettings can produce the table below:

Now that's a table that you can be proud of! The tableSettings object specified at the beginning of this README will produce these changes.

Property	Type	Required	Default	Description
tableId	string	❌	Randomly generated ID (e.g., table-79f3e496)	This is the id attribute of the table HTML element
themeName	TableTheme	❌	'lighter'	themeNameis a string literal type = 'light' | 'lighter' | 'dark' | 'darker' | 'custom’. You can check out all of the themes in the interactive docs.
showHeader	boolean	❌	false	Display the  headervalue above the table (#1 in the disgram below)
header	string	❌	'' (empty string)	Table header/caption/title to display above the table
showSortDescription	boolean	❌	false	Display the sort column and sort direction currently applied (#2 in the diagram below)
sortBy	string	❌	null	propName of the column to sort the table by. If not specified, no sorting behavior will be applied when component is loaded. (#3 in the diagram below)
sortDir	SortDirection	❌	'asc'	SortDirection is a string literal type = asc or desc. Determines if the sort behavior is applied in ascending or descending order.
tableWrapper	boolean	❌	false	Display a border around the table (#4 in the diagram below)
expandToContainerWidth 💎	boolean	❌	false	If the table width is smaller than the containing element, expand the wrapper/pagination sections to fill the container.
clickableRows 🎁	boolean	❌	false	The rowClicked event is raised when any row in the body of the table is clicked. The event contains the row data as an object of type T.
animateSorting 🎁	boolean	❌	false	Changes in row order are reflected as a flip animation when the sort behavior is changed (e.g., by clicking on a column header)
paginated	boolean	❌	false	Enables pagination. If false, all rows are displayed.
pageSize	number	❌	5	(If paginated) Number of rows to display per page. Must be one of the options in pageSizeOptions.
pageSizeOptions	number[]	❌	[5, 10, 15]	(If paginated) Array of possible page sizes, user can switch between page sizes at any time.
pageRangeFormat	PageRangeFormat	❌	'auto'	(If paginated) PageRangeFormat is a string literal type = 'none' | 'compact' | 'verbose' | 'auto'. See interactive docs for examples.
pageNavFormat	PaginationLayout	❌	'auto'	(If paginated) PaginationLayout is a string literal type = 'compact' | 'full' | 'auto'. See interactive docs for examples.
rowType	string	❌	'rows'	(If paginated) Since the page range description in verbose mode displays as 'XX-YY of ZZ total rowType' you can customize the term used to dsescribe the tabular data (e.g., '1-10 of 21 patients' or '6-10 of 21 vax records' in our table).

🎁Released in 0.0.16
💎Released in 0.0.26

😲 LISTEN UP, CHIEF: As explained above, the tableId prop is used as the id attribute of the table HTML element. Therefore, it is very important that you treat this value as a unique identifier, per HTML requirements. If you choose to provide your own value for tableId , it is extremely important that you do not reuse this value for another SimpleTable component, or any HTML element in your project. Bad things will happen, trust me!

Themes

CSS Custom Properties

The following CSS custom properties can be applied either at the body element (if you want all tables throughout your site to use a single, uniform theme) or can be applied individually to each table. Detailed instructions and an interactive theme editor is a WIP, will be available ASAP:

--sst-font-size
--sst-table-wrapper-border-width
--sst-table-wrapper-border-style
--sst-table-wrapper-padding
--sst-sort-description-font-size
--sst-table-header-font-size
--sst-table-border-radius
--sst-col-header-padding
--sst-col-header-text-weight
--sst-col-header-highlight-text-weight
--sst-body-cell-padding
--sst-button-group-border-radius

--sst-table-wrapper-bg-color
--sst-table-wrapper-border-color

--sst-text-color
--sst-link-text-color
--sst-link-hover-text-color
--sst-table-outer-border-color
--sst-table-header-text-color
--sst-sort-description-text-color
--sst-page-range-description-text-color

--sst-col-header-bg-color
--sst-col-header-text-color
--sst-col-header-vert-border-color
--sst-col-header-horiz-border-color
--sst-col-header-highlight-sort-bg-color
--sst-col-header-highlight-sort-text-color
--sst-col-header-highlight-sort-vert-border-color
--sst-col-header-highlight-sort-horiz-border-color

--sst-body-even-row-bg-color
--sst-body-odd-row-bg-color
--sst-body-inner-vert-border-color
--sst-body-inner-horiz-border-color
--sst-body-highlight-sort-bg-color
--sst-body-highlight-sort-text-color
--sst-body-highlight-sort-border-color

--sst-button-text-color
--sst-button-bg-color
--sst-button-border-color

--sst-button-hover-text-color
--sst-button-hover-bg-color
--sst-button-hover-border-color

--sst-button-active-text-color
--sst-button-active-bg-color
--sst-button-active-border-color

--sst-button-disabled-text-color
--sst-button-disabled-bg-color
--sst-button-disabled-border-color

--sst-button-focus-border-color