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Showing a table

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Building a Table

We have found that one of the most useful things you can do to understand how your app works is to give you easy access to the underlying data used to display items on screen. A very easy way of doing this is by showing the data in a table. We have optimized for this particular use case that makes it dead-simple to expose your data in a table that you can sort, filter and select items for more detailed information. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be editing the index.tsx file that was generated in the previous scaffolding step, and update it as follows:

Row Types

We start by defining what our table rows look like as types:

type Row = {
  id: number,
  title: string,
  url: string,
};

It is important that you have some unique identifier for every row so that we know when something new was added to the table. We will use the id field here for this purpose.

Columns

Next, we define which columns to show and how to display them:

import {DataTableColumn} from 'flipper-plugin';

const columns: DataTableColumn<Row>[] = [
  {
    key: 'title',
    width: 150,
  },
  {
    key: 'url',
    title: 'URL',
  },
];

The keys used here will show up again in the next step when building your rows, so keep them consistent. The title we define for each column will show up as the header at the top of the table, and will be default to the key value if omitted.

For the width you can either choose a fixed number (pixels), a percentage, or leave it out to distribute the remaining available space.

Configuring the table

With a type describing the data we'll be storing, Row, and a descriptions of the columns to display, getting up table showing our data, including search / sort and a details view is now trivial!

import {DataTableColumn, createTablePlugin} from 'flipper-plugin';

module.exports = createTablePlugin<Row>({
  columns,
  method: 'newRow',
  key: 'id',
});

The method refers to the method that should be listened to to fill the table with data. The string "newRow" that is used here refers back to identifier we used with connection.send to send our data to the Flipper desktop application in the previous step.

The key property is optional, but by setting it the 'id' field will be used as identifier. As a result, once a newRow message arrives with an existing id, it will overwrite the old entry, rather than appending a new one.

The createTablePlugin API supports more options, which are documented here.

And that's it! Starting Flipper will now compile your plugin and connect to the native side. It's a good idea to start Flipper from the command line to see any potential errors. The console in the DevTools is a great source of information if something doesn't work as expected, too. The final result of this step can be seen at index_table.tsx.

What's next?

You now have an interactive table that you can sort, filter and use to get additional information about the stuff you see on screen. createTablePlugin is a high level abstraction that takes care of both connection management and a standardized UI for the most common scenario.

For many cases, this is already all you need. However, sometimes you want to go the extra mile and want to build something a bit more custom. That's what we're going to do in the next part of our tutorial.


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