Best way to represent a Grid or Table in AngularJS with Bootstrap 3?

Question

I am creating an App with AngularJS and Bootstrap 3. I want to show a table/grid with thousands of rows. What is the best available control for AngularJS & Bootstrap with features like Sorting, Searching, Pagination etc.

Answer 1

After trying out ngGrid, ngTable, trNgGrid and Smart Table, I have come to the conclusion that Smart Table is by far the best implementation AngularJS-wise and Bootstrap-wise. It is built exactly the same way as you would build your own, naive table using standard angular. On top of that, they have added a few directives that help you do sorting, filtering etc. Their approach also makes it quite simple to extend yourself. The fact that they use the regular html tags for tables and the standard ng-repeat for the rows and standard bootstrap for formatting makes this my clear winner.

Their JS code depends on angular and your html can depend on bootstrap if you want to. The JS code is 4 kb in total and you can even easily pick stuff out of there if you want to reach an even smaller footprint.

Where the other grids will give you claustrophobia in different areas, Smart Table just feels open and to the point.

If you rely heavily on inline editing and other advanced features, you might get up and running quicker with ngTable for instance. However, you are free to add such features quite easily in Smart Table.

Don't miss Smart Table!!!

I have no relation to Smart Table, except from using it myself.

Answer 2

I had the same requirement and solved it using these components:

• AngularJS 1.0.8
• AngularUI Boostrap 0.10.0: Compatible with AngularJS 1.0.8 and Boostrap CSS 3.x.
• ng-grid 2.0.7: Compatible with AngularJS 1.0.8
• Bootstrap CSS 3.0

The table component ng-grid is capable of displaying hundreds of rows in a scrollable grid. If you have to deal with thousands of entries you are better off using ng-grid's paginator. The documentation of ng-grid is excellent and contains many examples. Sorting and searching are supported even in combination with pagination.

Here is a screenshot from a current project to give you an impression how it looks like:

[UPDATE July 2017]

After having ng-grid in production for a couple of years, I can still tell that there are no major issues with this component. Yes, plenty of minor bugs, but no show stoppers (at least in my use cases). Having said that, I would strongly advice against using this component if you start a project from the scratch. This component is a good option only if you are bound to AngularJS 1.0.x. If you are free to choose the Angular version, go for a newer component. A list of table components for Angular 4 was compiled by Sam Deering in this blog.

Answer 3

With "thousands of rows" your best bet would obviously be to do server side paging. When I looked into the different AngularJs table/grid options a while back there were three clear favourites:

• ng-grid
• ng-table
• Smart-Table

All three are good, but implemented differently. Which one you pick will probably be more based on personal preference than anything else.

ng-grid is probably the most known due to its association with angular-ui, but I personally prefer ng-table, I really like their implementation and how you use it, and they have great documentation and examples available and actively being improved.

Answer 4

A feature rich Angular grid is this one:

trNgGrid

Some of its features:

• Was built with simplicity in mind.
• Is using plain HTML tables, allowing the browsers to optimize the rendering.
• Fully declarative, preserving the separation of concerns, thus allowing you to fully describe it in HTML, without messing up your controllers.
• Is fully customizable via templates and two-way data bound attributes.
• Easy to maintain, having the code written in TypeScript.
• Has a very short list of dependencies: AngularJs and Bootstrap CSS, with optional Bootswatch themes.

Enjoy. Yes, I'm the author. I got fed up with all the Angular grids out there.

Answer 5

For anyone reading this post: Do yourself a favor and stay away of ng-grid. Is full of bugs (really..almost every part of the lib is broken somehow), the devs has abandoned the support of 2.0.x branch in order to work in 3.0 which is very far of being ready. Fixing the problems by yourself is not an easy task, ng-grid code is not small and is not simple, unless you have a lot of time and a deep knowledge of angular and js in general, its going to be a hard task.

Bottom Line: is full of bugs, and the last stable version has been abandoned.

The github is full of PRs, but they are being ignored. And if you report a bug in the 2.x branch, it's get closed.

I know is an open source proyect and the complains may sound a little bit out of place, but from the perspective of a developer looking for a library, that's my opinion. I spent many hours working with ng-grid in a large proyect and the headcaches are never ending

Answer 6

TrNgGrid is working great so far. Here are the reasons I prefer it to ng-grid and moved to this component

• It makes table elements so it can be bootswatched and use all the power of bootstrap .css (ng-grid uses jQuery UI themes).

• Simple, well documented grid options.

• Server size paging works

Answer 7

At the end of the this answer to the question of how to think in Angular if you have a jQuery background, the top post from Josh David Miller summarizes:

Don't even use jQuery. Don't even include it. It will hold you back. And when you come to a problem that you think you know how to solve in jQuery already, before you reach for the $, try to think about how to do it within the confines the AngularJS. If you don't know, ask! 19 times out of 20, the best way to do it doesn't need jQuery and to try to solve it with jQuery results in more work for you.

Now if you want a grid with tons of features and options for customization, jQuery DataTables is one of the best. The Angular-only grids I have seen don't come close to what jQuery DataTables can do.

However, jQuery DataTables does not integrate well with AngularJS. (There have been various efforts, but none offer seamless integration.)

Perhaps that leaves a person with two options.

The first is to go with a pure Angular grid that is not as feature rich as DataTables. I agree with @Moonstom about getting fed up with the other Angular grids out there, and trNgGrid does look nice.

The second option is to say: this is one of those rare 1 out of 20 cases where you should use jQuery and go with the jQuery DataTables plug-in, because the efforts to re-invent the wheel with the pure Angular grids have yielded a less robust wheel than DataTables.

It would be nice if it were otherwise, but I just have not seen the Angular ecosystem come up with as strong a grid as jQuery DataTables, and it is not as if a good data grid is a nice-to-have in a web app: a good grid is an essential.

Answer 8

You can use bootstrap 3 classes and build a table using the ng-repeat directive

Example:

angular.module('App', []);

function ctrl($scope) {
    $scope.items = [
        ['A', 'B', 'C'],
        ['item1', 'item2', 'item3'],
        ['item4', 'item5', 'item6']
    ];
}

<link href="http://netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.3/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.2.23/angular.min.js"></script>

<div ng-app="App">
  <div ng-controller="ctrl">
    
    
    <table class="table table-bordered">
      <thead>
        <tr>
          <th ng-repeat="itemA in items[0]">{{itemA}}</th>
        </tr>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
        <tr>
          <td ng-repeat="itemB in items[1]">{{itemB}}</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td ng-repeat="itemC in items[2]">{{itemC}}</td>
        </tr>
      </tbody>
    </table>
    
    
  </div>
</div>

live example: http://jsfiddle.net/choroshin/5YDJW/5/

Update:

or you can always try the popular ng-grid , ng-grid is good for sorting, searching, grouping etc, but I haven't tested it yet on a large scale data.

Answer 9

Adapt-Strap. Here is the fiddle.

It is extremely lightweight and has dynamic row heights.

<ad-table-lite table-name="carsForSale"
               column-definition="carsTableColumnDefinition"
               local-data-source="models.carsForSale"
               page-sizes="[7, 20]">
</ad-table-lite>

Answer 10

As mentioned in other answers: For a table with search, select and pagination "ng-grid" is the best options. A couple of things I have come across I will mention which might be useful while implementing:

To set env:

1. http://www.json-generator.com/ to generate JSON data. Its a pretty cool tool to get your sample data set to make development faster.

2. You can check this plunker for your implementation. I have modified to include: search, select and pagination http://plnkr.co/edit/gJPBz0pVxGzKlI8MGOit?p=preview

You can check this tutorial about Smart table, Gives all the info you need: http://lorenzofox3.github.io/smart-table-website/

Then the next question is bootstrap 3 : Its not exactly but this templates looks good. - You can just use https://github.com/angular-ui/bootstrap/tree/master/template all the templates are well written.

I can go on about how to convert bootstrap 3 to angularjs but its already mentioned in following links:

• Bootstrap 3 compatible with current AngularJS bootstrap directives?
• https://github.com/angular-ui/bootstrap/issues/331

please note that regarding smart-table you have to check if it ready for your angular version

Answer 11

Kendo grid is good as well as Wijmo. I know Kendo comes with Angular bindings for their datasource and I think Wijmo has an Angular plugin. Neither are free though.