Grid Introduction

Although the source of the first example is self-explanatory, it's worth pointing out the basics of SlickGrid. The following line:

var slickgrid = new Slick.Grid(container, rows, columns, options);

initializes and renders SlickGrid, and assigns its interface to the slickgrid var. Now we can use slickgrid.someMethod() in order to interact with it.

Container

container (an Element or a jQuery selector) points to the HTML element where the grid will be created, typically being an empty <div>. The <div> should have explicit dimensions (height and width) specified via CSS or the style attribute. The grid will be sized to occupy all available space.

Rows

rows is an array of data objects. Example:

var rows = [
    {
        field_1: "value1",
        field_2: "value2"
    }, {
        field_1: "value3",
        field_2: "value4"
    }
];

Providing data to the grid is explained in more detail here.

As it is passed by reference to the grid, you can modify it directly, but since the grid doesn't know when the data has changed, you need to let it know that it needs to rerender:

slickgrid.invalidate();

This forces all the rows to be destroyed and recreated, but since the grid only renders the rows in the viewport (plus a small buffer), the performance of this method is constant and does not depend on the number of rows in the dataset. If you want to be more efficient, however, you can let the grid know exactly which rows need to be rerendered and whether the number of rows has changed:

slickgrid.invalidateRows([4, 7]);
slickgrid.updateRowCount();
slickgrid.render();

Doing that will make the grid rerender rows 4 and 7 (0-based) as well as update the number of rows (new rows will be rendered and rows no longer in the dataset will be removed).

This is one of key strengths of SlickGrid which allows for extremely efficient UI updates.

Columns

columns is an array of objects, having at least the following fields:

• name - The name to be displayed in the view.
• field - The field name used in the data row objects.
• id - An unique identifier for each column in the model, allowing to set more than one column reading the same field.

Other fields include:

    resizable
    sortable
    selectable
    focusable
    width
    minWidth
    maxWidth
    rerenderOnResize
    headerCssClass
    formatter
    editor
    etc.

Example:

var columns = [
    {
        name: "Address",
        field: "address",
        id: "address",  // In most cases field and id will have the same value.
        sortable: true
    }, 
    {
        name: "Rating, in %",
        field: "rating", // This and the following column read the same data, but can present it in a different way.
        id: "rating_percent",
        resizable: false
    }, 
    {
        name: "Rating, in stars",
        field: "rating",
        id: "rating_stars"
    }
];

Options

options allows you to specify additional options.

Events

SlickGrid has its own simple implementation of events. To subscribe to an event, call event.subscribe() and pass in a function that will take two parameters - an event object that contains the browser event, if any, and an additional args object that contains data passed from the grid.

An example:

slickgrid.onDblClick.subscribe(function(e, args){
    var args.item; // object containing name, field, id, etc
});

See the events for the full list.

Basic sorting

It can be achieved by listening the onSort method:

	slickgrid.onSort.subscribe(function(e, args){ // args: sort information. 
		var field = args.sortCol.field;
		
		rows.sort(function(a, b){
			var result = 
				a[field] > b[field] ? 1 :
				a[field] < b[field] ? -1 :
				0;
				
			return args.sortAsc ? result : -result;
		});
		
		slickgrid.invalidate();			
	});