%%sortable
|| Title || Author || Published   || Edition || Some IP@        || Expenses
| book1  |  zappy  |  25 Feb 2005 |  5       |  100.100.100.100 |  €500
| book2  |  happy  |  25 Jan 2005 |  19      |  256.100.100.100 |  €1500
| book3  |  pappy  |  23 Mar 2005 |  06      |  10.100.100.100  |  €50
| book4  |  dappy  |  21 Apr 2005 |  199     |  1.100.100.100   |  €0.500
| book5  |  rappy  |  25 Jul 2005 |  017     |  1.100.25.100    |  €5500
/%

Implementation#

The implementation was inspired by the excellent javascript created by Erik Arvidsson. See http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/sortabletable/sortabletable.html.

However, I refactored it completely so it better fits with JSPWiki pages. JSPWiki tables dont use thead or tbody tags; it needed to be more flexible to change the appearance of the sortAscending/sortDescending controls through css; allowing fine control in different skins; and I wanted automatic recognition of the data-type of the column to be sorted.

Javascript#

Check out the scripts/jspwiki-common.js file for the actual implementation.

The needed javascript is very powerful, and still pretty small. Everything is included in the Sortable object to keep the .js namespace unpolluted.

The onPageLoad does the initialisation after the page is loaded. (make sure to add a call to this function in your window.onload() handler somewhere) It will track all %%sortable elements and process its first TABLE element. An onclick() handler is added to each column header which points to the heart of the javascript: the Sortable.sort() function.

The sort function has four major steps :

1. Validate the header row and checking which column was clicked
2. Copy the table body rows into a javascript array and at the same time find out the data-type of the column to be sorted being date, number or (default) string format
3. Do the actual sort or reverse sort
4. Put the sorted array back into the DOM tree of the document

The Sortable.convert() and Sortable.createCompare() are helper functions for data-type conversion and for creation of appropriate comparsion routines used by the javascript sort engine.

CSS#

Check out the templates/default/jspwiki.css file for the css definitions.

Following CSS selectors can be changed if needed:

• column headers which are clickable, but not yet sorted, get the style .sort
• column headers, which are sorted ascending, get the style .sortAscending.
• column headers, which are sorted descending, get the style .sortDescending.