Poor user experience when resizing in datatable

[callahan]

There are issues with datatable column resizing in 3.0.M2-SNAPSHOT that result in what I'd regard as a poor user experience.

The first issue is random column resizing. To see this open http://www.primefaces.org/showcase-labs ... izable.jsf and perform the following steps:

1. Resize the Color column to about 1cm. This will not work, which may be correct as the Color column needs more than 1cm of space.
2. Resize the Year column making it about 3cm wider. This will work, however, not only will the Year column become wider, the Model and Color columns will also become smaller which was not desired.
3. Resizing any column other than the first column will now appear to have a random effect on the size of all columns.
4. Resizing the first column appears to fix things.

The second issue is the column resizer, i.e., the small div that the user clicks and drags to resize a column. This div only overlaps the last few pixels at the end of a column. It would be better if it overlapped the last few pixels at the end of a column and the first few pixels at the start of the next column. This would result in a better user experience. Currently, when the user aims at the column resizer, they will miss it about 50% of the time.

[Oleg]

Hi,

I agree with callahan. The column resizing is very strange and buggy in PrimeFaces. All issues are well reproducable in a few seconds. Can you not use any proved and ready-to-use soltions instead of "home grown" one?

That's not a critique, no, but I think it's not possible to develop a bug free widget or advanced JS functionality inside of just one release cycle. Widgets developers polish up your widgets for months / years. Why not take a ready-to-use solution and adjust it for own purposes?

[callahan]

Yep, writing a production quality datatable is quite a challenge and there's still quite a bit of work to do. I hope PrimeFaces hasn't bitten off more than it can chew.

[cagatay.civici]

We still couldn't manage to make resizable play nice.

[cagatay.civici]

Regarding using a third party widget, remember the YUI times? They bring their own trouble. I'd rather fix my own bugs rather than theirs plus mine.

This comes from an experience.

Problem is any kind of datatable is way too complicated.

[Oleg]

Hello Cagatay,

Maybe this can help you to manage resizable columns http://robau.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/u ... th-jquery/

The table looks bad in the demo, but resizing is fast and error free (I have played 1-2 min. with it)

Good luck.
Oleg.

[cagatay.civici]

Looks good Oleg, we'll check thanks, also looking at other solutions that we can borrow for this particular functionality. I'm actually fine with using a third party widget for a specific feature like resize but not for the core datatable like yui datatable, jqgrid and more.

Writing a home grown widget is a challenge but it pays of in the end since we have more flexibility.

[Oleg]

And I agree with Cagatay - "home grown" datatable for JSF library is much better than one from the third-party lib. I see here advantages for "home grown" datatable. PF datatable looks very well too. That's for sure.

[callahan]

Yes, check to see if the resizer that Oleg suggests would work with the PrimeFaces datatable. If it's left the way it is it will be unusable.

[callahan]

The resizer Oleg suggested is better, but appears to have similar issues