Friday, August 31, 2012

Simplifying JQuery Grid (jqGrid) and Master-Detail Form in Grails

What if you can incorporate the powerful JQuery Grid (jqGrid) component like the following screen into your Grails application in just 3 steps?

First of all, the features and codes to be discussed in this blog post was implemented by a Grails plugin known as "jquery-grid" which using jqGrid 4.4.0 released, it don't have any dependency and relationship with Grails jqGrid plugin.

Let's look at how it can be done:
1. In the person/list.gsp, specified the following code block before the </head> tag to import jqGrid resources:
<r:require module="jquery-grid-en"/>
(en is for English, the plugin support internationalization)
2. Render the JQuery Grid in the person/list.gsp using <g:jqueryGrid> tag, for example:
<g:jqueryGrid for="com.vobject.addressbook.Person" properties="title, firstName, lastName, dateOfBirth, remark" columnWidth="50,150,100,100,350" />
3. Implement the corresponding server-side operation which render data as JSON. In the future, server-side code writing will be eliminated as it will be implemented with the help of dynamic-controller plugin like the Flexigrid example.

Done! You will see the person list render as JQuery Grid component in the picture above after you run "grails run-app".

A great feature of the plugin is embedded-inline-editable grid support which allowed you to use the grid component in detail section of the Master-Detail form, for example the Communication List in the following screen:
The embedded-inline-editable grid support add new row to the grid as well as delete multiple selected rows. The <g:jqueryGrid> tag syntax is similar to the previous one with additional type attribute, please see the sample code below:
<g:jqueryGrid for="com.vobject.addressbook.Communication" properties="type, value" type="embedded-inline-editable" rowNum="5" width="595" />

The jquery-grid plugin implemented the following features:
  • Sort by column
  • Delete selected rows
  • Filter by column(s)
  • Advance search
  • Select all rows
  • embedded-inline-editable grid with "Add Row" and "Delete Row(s)" button and jquery-validation-ui plugin integration.
  • Show AJAX dialog and submit AJAX form (eg: Create Person and Edit Person screen)
(You can see the features above in the slides I published to slideshare)

I'd love to hear your comments!

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7 comments:

Dado said...

Interesting plugin, really agile! Thanks, I'll try it for sure.

MDM said...

Very interesting, but where the plugin can be found ? It is not listed on the grails.org site, neither on your published plugin list

Lim Chee Kin said...

It was not published yet, still under cooking :)

Sundara Kaku @ iCore Innovations said...

Hi,

I would like to use this plugin, how can i download and install this new plugin

Susana Lozano said...

Very interesting. Hopefully I can download soon. Thank.

sailorkid said...

Good work, any update on release date?

thanks

Unknown said...

is very good.

Please you share you sample app?

thanks