Need Recommendations: Tables with Search Filters

  • zimbandrew

    (@zimbandrew)


    4 years ago

    Greetings,
    I wonder if anyone has any bright ideas about tables of data (in this case lengthy nominal rolls, rolls of honour, member listings) which are searchable with a keyword filter. I am using TablePress presently, but this clearly was not designed for large tables. Load time is a big problem and caching seemingly will not help. For those of you who are expert in this area, I am looking for suggestions. Are there plugins that allow fast loading of data and instant key word searchability. The presence of large tables on the site is critical for researchers.

    • This topic was modified 4 years ago by zimbandrew.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • TobiasBg

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    thanks for your question, and sorry for the trouble.

    Unfortunately, I’m not aware of a directly usable solution for this. Your best approach might be a custom implementation of a mySQL database table, with PHP to retrieve the data, and the “server side” mode of the DataTables JS library to do the filtering, see https://datatables.net/manual/server-side

    Regards,
    Tobias

    Thread Starter zimbandrew

    (@zimbandrew)

    Tobias, Thanks… I will most certainly take a look at DataTables and see if I am brave enough for this! You have been of wonderful help… thank you.

    So, in theory, I format a CSV file to an HTML table and upload that to the server… then I simply implement the JS and CSS and all will be fine? Sounds too simple.

    • This reply was modified 4 years ago by zimbandrew.
    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    I’m not 100% sure, but I think Tobias is suggesting importing into a mySQL table, not HTML. If so, I concur. You can use the phpMyAdmin app to import CSV data into a mySQL table.

    But our concepts diverge after that. I would use PHP to formulate a query to retrieve only the desired data instead of filtering with some other module. Do whatever works best for you, but I think keeping the source data in a mySQL table is your best option in any case.

    The model I’m thinking of is much like the Posts List Table class WP uses to display posts in the back end. In fact, you could possibly use the WP_List_Table class to display your data after it’s retrieved through PHP and mySQL queries.

    TobiasBg

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    zimbandrew: Yes, that sounds too simple ?? It would basically be the same problem that you have now, as you don’t want to all data at once in the HTML, but only the desired data.

    That’s what bcworkz means here, as well: You put all data in a mySQL table, but use PHP to formulate a SQL filter query (the DataTables server-side script might pretty much already do that, you’d just have to integrate the result into WordPress).

    Regards,
    Tobias

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘Need Recommendations: Tables with Search Filters’ is closed to new replies.