AshTable - a sortable paginated LiveView table component for Ash

Awesome

Some small notes:

Additional action opts

You’ll likely want to accept additional options to the action for things like authorization, multitenancy, etc. A name used for this in some places is action_opts or read_opts.

results =
      query |> apply_sort(sort, columns) |> Ash.read!(Keyword.merge(assigns[:action_opts] || [], [page: [limit: limit, offset: offset]]))

Multiple pagination strategies

There is keyset and offset pagination available in core, for keyset pagination, you’d replace offset with an after or before key. With that in mind, you might want to accept page_opts (or perhaps use the action_opts vs read_opts suggestion above to encompass the concept)

Recently did some related work, more in the ‘batteries-included’ fashion. Here’s a live demo of a PoC that I prepared for a former client of mine:

https://ash-table-poc.mxgrn.com

It’s note a library (although I did put effort into making the table a reusable component), but maybe some ideas could be an inspiration. E.g. the table auto-configures itself from the Ash resource. Columns can be dragged around and resized, inline editing is supported, etc.

That’s a really nice example. There’s definitely some bits I’d like to borrow and incorporate. I love how it generates the columns for you and does the whole CRUD lifecycle. Nice work, thanks for sharing that!

Thanks Zach, having a read_options as assign you can pass definitely makes sense. Supporting multiple pagination strategies also would be great, just got give it a little more thought in terms of how to support it.

Following @zachdaniel 's suggestion, released 0.2.0 which allows read_options to be passed to specify tenant, actor, etc

Noice!

Something you might also consider is allowing a list as the sort_key, and constructing the sort_expr automatically if they don’t provide an apply_sort. Would look something like this:

require Ash.Sort

sort = 
  case sort_key do
    value when is_atom(value) or is_string(value) -> 
      {value, direction}
  
    value when is_list(value) -> 
      {path, [name]} = Enum.split(value, -1)

    {Ash.Sort.expr_sort(ref(^path, ^name)), direction}
  end

Hmm.. that’s really interesting. I wonder if it might be even nicer to lightly parse the sort_key (not married to this name) and if there is a . in it turn it into a path.

that is clever, I’m into it

now that you point it out though, that is just what ash core should do also perhaps. People are typically pretty annoyed to break out expr_sort just for a to_one related field.

its on the roadmap now: Support related sorts via dot separated identifiers in sort · Issue #1272 · ash-project/ash · GitHub