Possible for DataGrid to display multiple records per row?

[Arnold]

DataGrid and QuickForm are two of my most often used PEAR packages. They have been working great for most of my backend application development.

I try to incorporate DataGrid to my current eCommerce application but realize this may be a challenge for the "frontend" part to display multiple products in single row as often that's the case for on-line shops such as osCommerce. Any insight if there are tricks to achieve that in DataGrid. If not, are there similar PEAR packages to do that? Thanks in advance.

[mark]

What is your goal? Do you want to place your products like the following numbers?

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

If that's the case, I assume that you don't need column headers and no sorting (by clicking on the headers). You have at least two choices then:

- overload the HTML_Table renderer of SDG (buildBody() or buildRow()) and let it behave in the required way

- use HTML_Table directly: simply execute your SQL query, use a loop over the result set, and generate a new row for every (e.g.) third product

Otherwise, you might want to clarify what your goal is ...

[Arnold]

Thanks Mark, that's exactly what I intend to do. I think the first option (overload) seems to be a good solution to work seamlessly with SDG. Do you have any code snippet how to achieve that in HTML_Table? It should work with pager too, right?

[mark]

[Arnold]

Thanks. That should get me going for now. I'll let u know if I get stuck.

[Arnold]

Hi Mark,

I have successfully made it to work. Essentially I am making a new custom renderer for SDG as you suggest. It does take me a while to figure out all the pieces as the custom renderer page for SDG on the pear website is a big empty.

For those who may be interested, this is how it is done and please point me out if there is better way to accomplish it. It will be better if there is way to do it without touching the DataGrid.php file.

In DataGrid.php, add your custom type (e.g. TABLE2 in my example)

define (DATAGRID_RENDER_TABLE2, 'HTMLTable2')
'html_table2' => DATAGRID_RENDER_TABLE2

create a new class file extending HTML_Table and place the new file HTMLTable2.php in Structures/DataGrid/Renderer

overload buildBody() and buildRow() in the new class file accordingly.

in main file, instantiate the new object and call setRenderer(DATAGRID_RENDER_TABLE2). pager will work by multiplying your specific number of records per row. for instance,

1234
5678

then the pass-in pager value should be 8.

I have been using style to suppress header in the past by setting the header attributes but it doesn't work with my new custom renderer for whatever reasons. so I have to hack it by setting $table->_thead = null. How should one hide the header info properly?

[mark]