Forums

Hello pragnesh.

I suppose you should inspect the cell content.

See, for instance, the topic "Hide or disable a cellEditor" as starting point:
viewtopic.php?p=19228

myCell = record.getData('someMandatoryField');
// and now you can inspect myCell content.

Hope that helps,
IceBox

I think pragnesh was referring to each individual cell (column) containing more complex data, such as from a custom formatter where the contents might be text and/or a link, button or other DOM element in addition to the basic data.

If that is the case, it is very difficult to do using DataTable methods because the most detailed level that DT supports is "cell". You can't use DT methods to track events (click, mouseover, etc..) to internal elements. See a similar thread of http://yuilibrary.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=7887.

Pragnesh, if this is what you are looking to do, you may need to use Event Delegation (see http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/event/event-delegation.html) on the internal DOM elements of the cells.

... let us know if this is what you are looking for, okay?

Todd

Dave,

Sure you can define onclick or Event click handlers all you want to to cells of a DataTable. But the problem is this is a major source of memory leaks and problems. If you have a DT with 500 rows in it, and have a formatter that defines click handlers in a formatter ... that is adding potentially a thousand click handlers. If the user edits or sorts a column, the formatter gets re-called again!, so you can duplicate event handlers ... it it becomes mayhem.

That is one of the reasons Event Delegation is good. Let's say your DT is built upon <div id="idTable>. And let's say your custom formatter addes <a> elements in a column on each record. You can use the following;
to define one click handler which is far superior to having thousands (from a performance perspective). The problem is, finding the "id" or Column and Record position of that link in the DataTable, since it is no longer available.

Regards,
Todd

Hey Dave,

As for the XY method, I don't know how that would work in a DataTable? Won't the .getXY just return the absolute or offset screen coordinates of the click ... how can that be translated into a specific row/column ??

The memory leak issue happen when Listeners are added and not fully purged and/or removed completely. If you put listeners in a DataTable column formatter you run the risk of them not properly being removed prior to being re-created on the same DOM element on a formatter re-call (sort, edit, insert, etc...).

As for the "no longer available" comment, if you define a Delegate listener on an element of DataTable as I listed, you potentially eliminate the issues in the prior paragraph (listeners and memory leaks). The problem is the listener is not a specific method of DataTable, and therefore has no way of knowing what row/column pair the target is. The target now is just a DOM element that "happens to be" in a DataTable.

One way I have thought of getting around this is to have a global variable (or namespace protected variable) outside of DataTable that tracks current_row, current_column based on "cellMouseOverEvent". Then in the delegated "myLinkHandler" you can now use the last current_row / current_column pair as a reasonable owner of the target. Haven't tried it, just a thought, (I don't do these types of complex formatters with multiple DOM members ...)

Todd