Show HN: Datagridxl.js – No-nonsense fast Excel-like data table library

https://datagridxl.com

by robbiejs • 6 years ago

238 129 6 years ago

datagridxl.com

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hello HN,

I’m Robbert, the creator of DataGridXL.js.

DataGridXL is a free (and commercial) editable data table library written in ES6.

My goal is to develop the most performant & user-friendly spreadsheet-like data table out there:

- It has zero dependencies. You don’t need any framework to use DataGridXL.

- It is lightweight (~200kb) and easy to use. It does not even require messing with CSS.

- It has its own Virtual DOM implementation to prevent DOM errors.

- Developer friendly. Supports all modern web browsers

Please take a look at the performance demo (https://www.datagridxl.com/demos/one-million-cells) to see the difference with other data grids out there. And let us know if you have any suggestions.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments!

pulposus• 6 years ago

I'm not sure if this is just me, but the demos all fail because they try to load https://code.datagridxl.com/datagridxl.js and it's returning a 404.

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Not sure why that's happening. Is it still like that for you? What browser/OS?

mkl• 6 years ago

That title flashing "1 new message" nonsense is incredibly distracting.

Is there a UI way to quickly sort by a column?

MuffinFlavored• 6 years ago

sorting + filtering would be awesome too

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hi. Agree with the flashing message, I haven't found a way to turn it off yet.

I am actually working on a sort feature at this moment and I expect to release at the end of the week.

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hi mki,

I've just released a new version that adds a Sort Feature to the grid: https://www.datagridxl.com/demos/sorting-columns.

m1sta_• 6 years ago

An example using formulas (as javascript lambda functions) would be cool.

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hi, DGXL does not support formulas at this time and I am not sure if I will implement the feature. I'll let it depend on popular demand.

There are a few products out there that implement formulas. A site like www.jspreadsheets.com mentions a few. Many of these products are not super-reliable or performant though (reason why I started building DGXL in the first place).

pugio• 6 years ago

I have been looking for years for something to replace a custom rendered excel-like table I have.

The table has a complex layout:

- One fixed top row (date), two or three fixed columns on the left.

- Data are rendered horizontally; the number of rows does not change, but the number of columns can be in the hundreds.

Does your library support column-oriented data like this (you mention "60+" columns)? Does anyone know of any library which can easily render something like this? It's surprisingly hard to find something which lets you fix left hand columns and also render as many columns as I need.

prionassembly• 6 years ago

Ah, finance.

rowsncolumns6• 6 years ago

You could take a look at https://rowsncolumns.app , You can render as many columns as you want since the grid supports windowing.

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hi,

The component actually did have fixed/frozen columns/rows in an earlier version, but I decided to leave out the feature for a v1. I plan to reintroduce it after more popular features have been implemented.

DGXL is able to handle hundreds of columns. The reason why it says 60+ specifically is that, according to browser-vendors like Mozilla, a DOM node should ideally not have more than 60 child nodes - for performance/memory reasons.

infinite8s3• 6 years ago

JPMorgan has open-sourced a DOM based table that might work for you: https://github.com/jpmorganchase/regular-table.

Here's their excel like example showing 200 columns: https://bl.ocks.org/texodus/3e0e3d6f8bf8b47294a7847b402b55fb

TAForObvReasons2• 6 years ago

Congratulations on launching, but consider distilling a part of the project and making it available under a free and open source license like MIT or Apache or BSD.

There are many commercial and open source products on the market, some more established and less expensive than your offering. From the business standpoint, it's easy to sell something like ag-grid because many developers have experience with its open source offering, so we know that we can find experienced people on the market to help if necessary. Your project doesn't benefit from that community and doesn't benefit from having a lower price point (it's comparable to what ag-grid charges)

beojan• 6 years ago

I expect he may be averse to choosing a permissive license like the ones you mention, but perhaps AGPL?

sgarrity• 6 years ago

How did you implement the scrolling such that it feels smooth/fast/native, but scrolls in one row/column steps (so you never see half a row)?

CSS Scroll Snap?

Nicely done.

macNchz• 6 years ago

That’s an interesting case because it’s certainly a cool effect, but it’s kind of a cumbersome UX on mobile. It makes it hard to keep track of the columns as you scroll up and down. At a glance it seems like both the Google Sheets and Numbers iOS apps have smooth scrolling instead of snapping.

tobr• 6 years ago

Is this considered a feature? I thought it was a limitation to deal with performance. I find it rather disorienting.

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Thanks! I'd to write a proper "How It's Made" article about it in the future, but this is basically how it's done:

There is a blank DOM node "scrollArea" in front of all others that catches the native JS scroll event.

It then converts these scroll offsets (scrollTop and scrollLeft) to cell/viewport coordinates, by default 40px actual pixels per row/column.

So if the scrollArea has a scrollLeft of 40px and a scrollTop of 200px , an underlying DOM node that renders the cell values and column lines, will render at viewport position {x: 1, y: 5}.

The other important part that makes it snappy, is that a viewport of let's say 20 rows by 10 columns does not actually consist of 200 DOM nodes. Only columns are DOM nodes. The values inside a column are made to look like rows by CSS white-space property. So it only updates 10 DOM nodes when scrolling.

rowsncolumns6• 6 years ago

If a user is trying to scroll horizontally, we can get the delta and get the scroll direction. Find the column width of the next/prev column and update the scroll property. An implementation can look like:

const nextColumnIndex = scrollDeltaX < 0 ? Math.max(0, columnStart - 1) : Math.min(columnStart, columnCount - 1);

const columnWidth = getColumnWidth( nextColumnIndex );

scrollBar.scrollLeft += (scrollDeltaX < 0 ? -1 : 1) * columnWidth;

chrismorgan• 6 years ago

CSS Scroll Snapping doesn’t make scroll in steps like the steps() timing functions, it just controls the points that the eventual scroll position will snap to.

CSS Scroll Snapping may have a place for image gallery sorts of widgets, but for broader layout matters I strongly recommend against it: it can work tolerably on mobile (though it’s not without problems), but on desktop it seriously messes with scrolling so that on many devices it’s almost entirely problems.

Using a real scrolling area and observing what effect scrolling has upon it is the only correct way of rendering things. Then you could draw the contents in various ways—canvas (handle interactivity yourself), another DOM element behind the scrolling area (ditto), or a fancily-done `position: sticky` element that fills the visible part of the scrollable area.

Just remember that there are serious accessibility concerns about any of these sorts of things. Approach any sort of clever lazy loading of content with extreme caution.

lukeholder• 6 years ago

Vote for simple formulas like sum etc.

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Maybe one day, but no promises. I did experiment with formulas in an earlier version, and it was promising, but there's a lot of things that need to be exactly right.

Also, I need to draw a line somewhere. I cannot turn the product into a spreadsheet, as I have chosen for performance as my main feature, which means it cannot do things like merged rows, merged columns, etc.

So if I'd implement formulas, people might expect more & more features, which I then cannot deliver...

(There are products out there that have basic formula support.)

programmertote2• 6 years ago

Hi Robert,

This looks like a really great (clean and performant) JS library for interacting with data grid. I'll definitely remember to try it for my next side project.

A quick question: is there a way to make only some of the columns read-only in the grid? I looked through the doc [https://www.datagridxl.com/docs/setting-options] and it seems like user actions for columns are all (applied to every column) or none. If DataGridXL.js allows assigning read-only to a subset of columns, it'd be great to add that in the doc with an example.

Thanks for your hard work and especially for allowing others like me to try it for free!

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback!

Right now there is no such option, but it's definitely on the todos of 2020.

At this moment there are not many individual column options: the goal is to implement validation, formatting, read-only prop, etc. At this moment every column just displays raw values & everything's editable.

gravypod• 6 years ago

Congrats on launching! This seems like a great product! I have seen use cases where something like this could come very in handy. I don't know if this is useful but I'd be worried about using this library because: the difficult to adhere to pricing scheme, the high cost for the level of market saturation, and lack of quality support.

Since you're building a library, not a tool, whenever I hire an engineer they'll automatically be using this tool and I'd need to remember to send you more money. The only other products that I have to do this with are either:

1. Monthly subscriptions that automatically charge me the correct amount of money.

2. GitLab which tracks how much I owe the developer and charges me the correct amount of money the next time around.

I'm concerned that I'll pay for this software, download a .js file, check it into my repo, hire a new developer, and completely forget they're using this product.

The biggest difference between this tool and my currently paid-for software is that it has no "check-in" period. I could very easily imagine a scenario in which I violate your license. Here are two:

1. I, as an engineer on a single project in a large company, buy your software and use it in a product. I move on to other stuff and get asked to write new features after a long time completely forgetting your software was paid-for. Me and another engineer start working on the project. We now have 2 devs.

2. Another engineer sees me building a cool project. They copy my frontend as a starter for another feature. We now have 2 devs in a multiproject license.

3. We have the correct multi project license for the correct number of devs but we want to hire some contractors for some cheap work. Hiring these contractors just became a lot more expensive.

As for the pricing, at 54,100 EUR ($62,444.87 USD) for a 50 person team, you're competing with a sizable chunk of an engineers salary. Depending on what part of the world you're in you can pay for 1 quarter to 1 years worth of an engineers time with this chunk of change. It seems you're setting yourself aside from the competition because of performance reasons. If that is the large differentiated factor I'd be thinking the following as an engineering manager:

1. Given the timeline (3 months to 1 year) can I build my own implementation of this product?

2. Given the timeline can I take an open source implementation that has more features, use it until there's a performance problem, then have one of my 10x engineers tweak it to make it perform better?

3. Can I find another paid-for version of this library that will be cheaper? In this very HN post there's another implementation of a similar product with a seemingly similar feature set that is substantially cheaper [0] that is also source available.

So, when I'm crunching the numbers, and have to choose to Build, Tweak, or Buy at a cheaper price, it's hard to justify this product. What makes it even harder to justify the product is the support limitations. The main reason to never choose build or tweak or "buy the cheaper one" is because it won't save you any time. Your support page makes it seem like, however, I'll have to put a lot of time and effort into bending over backwards to make a support request that fits your model. This makes the comparison:

1. Build XYZ and support it

2. Tweak XYZ and support it internally

3. Buy your software and get very non-specific support

[0] https://rowsncolumns.app/pricing

koheripbal• 6 years ago

When it comes to reporting, I always get asked if I can have grouped rows that can be expanded/collapsed - it's such a frequent request.

Is that possible in your framework?

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hi, that's not possible, sorry. DGXL is mainly meant to be an editable input component, it's not a data table for presentation purposes.

Also see Features & Limits page: https://www.datagridxl.com/docs/features-limits.

randtrain34• 6 years ago

How does that compare to https://github.com/paulhodel/jexcel ?

sacky• 6 years ago

one thing is that datagridxl.js does not support formulas but jexcel does

kanobo2• 6 years ago

jexcel is great, it has more features (sorting, formulas, colors, etc)... but those same features are not very performant with many (>1000) rows since each cell is a html table cell. datagridxl looks promising if you need to display lots of data. I'm a fan of any open source data grid library so I'm happy both exists.

iopuy• 6 years ago

are both open source? click the buy button on datgridxl.js, only 800 euros!!

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

What I appreciate about Jexcel is their numerous input methods (like dropdowns and checkboxes). DGXL does not offer these features at this moment.

Both Jexcel and Handsontable are quite excellent when it comes to the amount of features, but they do have the same downsides: their enthusiastic creators implement any feature that they can dream off, ingoring the effects on performance and a growing code base that gets more complex every time.

If you're looking to create a spreadsheet app to compete with Excel or G. Sheets, don't look at DataGridXL. If you're looking for the fastest and most reliable editor for 2D or JSON data sets, choose DGXL :-)

paulhodel2• 6 years ago

Take a look on this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV6t1nv2Fjc

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Great question. I think Jexcel is a great effort. There's also Handsontable. I think Jexcel and Handsontable are pretty similar: they have a lot of features, but also a lot of the same errors: performance suffers and sometimes the DOM or CSS gets messed up after a user drag operation.

I wanted to tackle the performance & reliability issues mainly. My thinking is that most users won't probably need formulas, merged cells, HTML markup. DGXL really shines for larger data sets. Excellent for numeric data input specifically.

Also, I think it implements Excel/G. Sheets controls a little better: when your users are Excel-experts, but keyboard controls work just a little different then they're used to, that's quite annoying. My goal is to stick as best as I can to the original controls.

hadrien01• 6 years ago

So from what I understand this works by displaying data on a JS canvas. How does that work for accessibility? Do screen-readers read the data as if it was an html table?

kanobo2• 6 years ago

I haven't dug very deeply, but from what i can tell google sheets also uses a canvas too and it works with screen-readers somehow.

lights01232• 6 years ago

It uses <canvas>, but also has hacks for screen readers: open the demo and look for elements with the class of dgxl-innerColumn.

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hi, it does not use canvas. It uses HTML. Sure, DGXL contains one or two canvas elements, but they're used for measuring strings length and drawing cell background colors.

The actual values are all in HTML. The benefit is that you can use CTRL+F and values are found and selected. You can zoom the page and text will remain crisp.

The values are not in a <table> tag however. <table> values are sorted y,x (rows first, columns second). DGXL sorts values x,y (columns first, rows second). I have to admit that I am not sure what that means for screen readers: I am not an accessibility-expert at this stage. What I do know is that HTML is better than canvas by default in this regard.

whylo• 6 years ago

Unfortunately screen reader support isn't great at the moment, but using HTML instead of canvas is definitely going to make it easier for you to improve. I'd encourage you to download the free NVDA screen reader (https://www.nvaccess.org/download/) and compare DataGridXL with Excel, or Google Sheets with screen reader support enabled (Tools > Accessibility settings). Announcing the column, row and cell content as you navigate the sheet with the keyboard would be a great start. Google Sheets does this by updating the content of a visually hidden ARIA live region (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...) as you navigate.

darkmarmot2• 6 years ago

Doesn't work for me in chrome.... because it seems to break with Ad Blockers... that could be a real killer for you.

bdcravens• 6 years ago

I'm not having the same experience (using uBlock Origin)

darkmarmot2• 6 years ago

Ok, disabled it and I still get a big blank blob where the grid should be... looks like the js load keeps failing. oh well.

amanzi3• 6 years ago

Looks great. I couldn't see any way to sort by column - is that possible?

lecarore• 6 years ago

In the docs they precisely tell that this is not supported https://www.datagridxl.com/docs/features-limits

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hi, you're right. At this time it's not supported, but we're working on it. Probably next week. The other features are still a definite "no" for now :-)

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hi! Will be supported soon, possibly this week. If not, next week for sure. It's in the testing stages!

matyunya• 6 years ago

Shameless plug! https://ellx.io/ is a programmable spreadsheet with extended JavaScript for formulas (plus operator overloading and automatic async resolution)

bennettfeely• 6 years ago

It looks really great and the one million cells demo is impressive, but that price is way out of reach.

lights01232• 6 years ago

The price only includes support and the ability to remove branding. You can use it sans source code with branding for free.

programmarchy• 6 years ago

Compared to a developer’s salary, seems like this is priced pretty well.

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Right now the free version offers the same features as the commercial version. As long as you're OK with displaying the branding link and DIY-support, you can use the product for free, as long as you like.

rowsncolumns6• 6 years ago

Another plug - https://rowsncolumns.app

It's a canvas based SpreadSheet. The Grid works with React and Konva - https://konvajs.org/

You can see the demo here - https://rowsncolumns.app/demo

And a whole bunch of features and upcoming roadmap - https://rowsncolumns.app/#features

We are launching formula support with Web Workers soon.

coopsmgoops• 6 years ago

Genuinely curious. Why go with canvas over HTMl elements? Isn't it reinventing the wheel a bit for things like input fields

rowsncolumns6• 6 years ago

Sure. Input elements are still HTML FYI, we dont use canvas to simulate that.

I have been working with DataGrids for more than 4-5 years. So I consider myself at a position to compare HTML and Canvas performance

We went with Canvas because of the following reasons

1. Scroll performance is much better than HTML

2. Drawing on canvas is cheap compared to modifying DOM or attributes

3. Streaming updates are much smoother in canvas as drawing is quick. I had used Canvas as an interface for high-frequency trading

4. Canvas is easy to work with. And with https://konvajs.org/, any React developer will find it at home

5. No more Browser bugs :)

6. Performance tuning is quicker with Canvas

7. In the future, we can decide to use WebGL (using PixiJS)

Some problems with canvas IMO

1. There is no relative positioning :(. It sounds silly, but coming from HTML, any element can be positioned relative to its parent.

2. Styling/Pixel ratio/Stroke - can be hard to figure out first. And the 0.5px crisp stroke workaround on DPR 1 devices. Took me a long time to figure out

xyzzy_plugh• 6 years ago

On mobile it _looks_ like a spreadsheet but seems entirely unresponsive to, for example, selecting a cell.

rowsncolumns6• 6 years ago

Yeah. We may use learnings from Google Sheets on Mobile to design mobile interactions.

Cell Editing will be moved to the bottom

Cell-selection handles will be changed.

Formatting Toolbar will be displayed On-demand

Few more enhancements to make it touch friendly. We didnt receive any requests yet for mobile-support. When we do, it will be in our roadmap

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

For a moment I thought you were talking about DataGridXL, but your comment is on the canvas grid?

I actually made quite an effort to make DGXL work on touch screens. It's not there yet. It's basically read-only on touch for now, but you should have no problem selecting cells and copying values.

dkersten6• 6 years ago

Just an observation: on iOS I can scroll through the table, but I cannot select any cells.

captivechains• 6 years ago

Please improve the screen reader support

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Thanks, I have seen this suggestion a couple of times now in this thread. Will have to study it, as right now I am a non-expert when it comes to screen readers. Will make an effort to seriously improve this aspect!

w-ll• 6 years ago

oh man javascript devs are looking at what winform devs have been getting away with for years...

on top of the unimpressive feature set and price, they really dont have a good remote support... like Im just gonna send a json object with nearly 100 million rows.

pictur3• 6 years ago

Who are you targeting with 800 euro?

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Do you think it's too little or too much? This is my first commercial product. I have looked at other professional grids like Handsontable & Ag-Grid and have decided to choose a similar price, just to have some reference.

There will always be people that find it too expensive or that find it too cheap.

Even though the product looks like a simple <table> tag; the reality is that I spent 2 years working on it. (I am almost embarrassed to admit it.)

Let's say an employee of your company (or perhaps yourself) is a much better programmer than myself. He/she could perhaps build a similar data table in perhaps 6 months, including all these features that don't meet the eye: keyboard controls, context menus, touch events, virtual DOM implementation, clipboard support on all browsers and devices...

That would cost an employer perhaps 6 months worth of programmer salary, which is, depending on where you are, at least $10,000+.

Then 800 euros is not such a bad deal, I believe. At the same time, I hope it's affordable for solo makers as well.

How would you price the product?

pictur3• 6 years ago

I think not much. but I asked because I was wondering who could be a customer for this price.

dkersten6• 6 years ago

Handsontable has a lot more features, though. Maybe your unique selling points are enough, I don’t know, just on paper handsontable appears to provide a lot more for the price. I’m not suggesting you change it, just something to be aware of for your marketing.

For me, personally, handsontable was too expensive too though (I’m just one guy self funding my project) so ended up going with an open source table component instead.

jbverschoor2• 6 years ago

Nice man. Dutch Design.

Can't wait for features / extensions!

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Thanks! What features would you like to see implemented?

jbverschoor2• 6 years ago

Probably a plugin system for datatype => renders/editors. ex: (numbers, datepickers, select, checkboxes, etc.)

vandermark• 6 years ago

Awesome! Clean design + nice UX. I would have used it in my previous project.

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Thanks! It would have been a great FIT for your project. Much appreciated Vandermark! ;-)

nurettin4• 6 years ago

The features of a commercial grid that I'm currently using:

* incremental updates, inserts, deletes

* nested grids

* formula based coloring of cells

* column based filtering

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hi. Can you explain what you mean by "incremental updates"?

Regarding other bullet points:

* Nested Grids: no * Formulas: no / not anytime soon * Column based filtering: not on top of the list, but definitely doable.

nurettin4• 6 years ago

Hi, for an example, check out how the devxtreme datagrid uses a datasource object to manipulate the data in the grid in real time. Which means, instead of loading all the data into the grid before it is rendered at the time of declaration, the data can be appended, updated or deleted as it streams from a backend.

araker• 6 years ago

How does this compare to ag-grid?

Https://ag-grid.com

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Ag-grid has a lot more features. Very mature, big team I'd guess. However, Ag-grid does not offer quick Excel-like editing. If you're looking for this type of editing, don't bet on Ag-grid.

kevas• 6 years ago

Beautiful work. Will be using

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Thanks kevas, I appreciate it!

ddgflorida• 6 years ago

Nice. I read a CSV file with one mutli-line column in the last field with no problem, but when I copied the data, refreshed the page, and copied to empty grid, now the multi-line field incorrectly was split to the next line.

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hi! Thanks for sharing the issue. Mind sharing the CSV file and steps, so I can attempt to fix the issue? support@datagridxl.com.

robbiejs55• 6 years ago

Hello everyone,

Not sure if anyone is still reading this thread. Just wanted to express that I am very grateful for all the positive responses that we got in this thread and by e-mail.

Also, good news: We just released a new minor version today that adds the much requested Sort Feature to the grid: https://www.datagridxl.com/demos/sorting-columns.

Show HN: Datagridxl.js – No-nonsense fast Excel-like data table library

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