How to Display Dynamic non-DataObject Data in a Gridfield in Silverstripe 4.x?

0
votes

We have a Silverstripe 4.x project which uses the following Dataobjects to create dynamic tables:

DataColumn
 ColumnName

DataRow
 RowID

DataCell
 Value
 has_one DataColumn
 has_one DataRow

CMS Users can add/remove/edit columns - so we can't use a static Dataobject to represent this data.

However we would like to display this dynamic data in a Gridfield & export it as a CSV.

There are three possible approaches I can think of - but I'm not sure which one we should focus on (or whether there's a better way).

Approach #1: Create temporary Dataobject from dynamic data We could possibly create a temporary Dataobject in the database from the dynamic data. If we did this we could then display the temporary object in a Gridfield where it could be searched/ filtered/ exported etc. using the standard Gridfield functionality.

Approach #2: Transmute the dynamic data into a Gridfield Could it be possible to transmute the dynamic data into a DataList or ArrayList that could then be displayed in a Gridfield? This is similar to approach #1 but is done on the fly, rather than creating a temporary Dataobject in the database.

Approach #3: Recode Gridfield functionality for dynamic data format This is the fallback but would involve the re-inventing of many wheels - so this is our last option if the other two aren't possible.

Which approach should we take? Is there existing functionality that can do what we're after?

Any guidance is appreciated.

1
data-modelingsilverstripesilverstripe-4

1 Answers

1
votes

In theory, GridField is not bound to DataObject or DataList. It's working with the SS_List interface and an will mostly also accept ViewableData or ArrayData Objects.

Though that's not true for all gridfield components. So you will need to implement a lot of extra methods that the gridfield components expect.

Most components also expect each record to have a field ID.
And for example GridFieldSortableHeader expects the List to implement Sortable.

It's a bit of extra work, but it is definitely possible.

I have done several projects where I displayed external data from an api in a GridField by turning the data into a ArrayList of ArrayData objects and passing that into the gridfield. Though I had to customize some components like GridFieldDetailForm.

I've also built a projects with dynamic columns, where a user can select which columns to show (the DataObject had ~50 columns and not every user needed to see all of them). So I built a custom component to add a selection field to the top of the gridfield and then a modified GridFieldDataColumns that only showed the selected fields.