Can TableView host Views in cells?

[tig]

@tznind did you ever contemplate having the content for a cell in TableView be an arbitrary View?

[tznind]

Table View Limitations

TableView draws its content from a given row/column offset. It takes the next x rows where x is the screen height and measures the contents. Then it decides how many columns it can fit based on the size (width) of data in these rows and renders.

This means

• Rows can only ever be 1 in height
• As you scroll down columns can expand/contract as wider values are seen
• Scrolling increment is always done 1 row/column at a time

This was done to offer the best presentation and scaleability of tabular data.

---

Faking it

It is possible to achieve a similar behaviour to what you ask by holding a View in memory but not mounted and piping events to it. This is now TreeTableSource<T> works.

But notice how each 'row' of the table is still a line of the TreeView<T> there are no arbitrary height elements.

Similarly CheckBoxTableSourceWrapperBase lets checkboxes/radio appear in the table although in this case it is just a visual effect.

---

A table of views

To layout a collection of View as a table, I think we would want a new purpose built view or introduce the concept of a layout manager.

For TableLayout you would want to inspect all the View being presented in all 'boxes' and then fiddle the layouts e.g.

• Ensure all View on a row have the same height (that of the max height view in the row).
• Allow free scrolling (i.e. be able to scroll 1 console cell across at a time rather than jumping table cell by table cell

Here is the CSS specification for how to layout a table of arbitrary sized 'stuff':
https://drafts.csswg.org/css2/#tables

See in particular the most exciting bit: 17.5.2. Table width algorithms: the table-layout property

---

Related concepts

I notice how most users expect ScrollView to auto resize based on what gets added to it. Instead user has to manually measure their views and configure a set ContentSize. Once we are in the buisness of measuring views and adjusting layouts dynamically we could probably accomodate this.

There is also opportunities for things like FlowLayout or ColumnLayout which would be nice to have.

[tig]

Excellent response. Thanks!

No real need for this now, I just was curious. I do like the idea of a TableLayout.