Is a Custom Front End Query Builder (multi row filter), Multi Sort and Export Possible?

[TwitchBlade]

Afternoon Everyone,

I’m am very close to pulling the trigger on an Individual Wappler Pro subscription but there are three features making me hesitate cause I’m not sure if they are possible with Wappler. They are also the reason I always end up coding from scratch instead of using a framework. I haven’t found one that makes these features easy to implement. They may do one or two but never three.

Just about every custom database I build for my clients includes the ability to build their own query for searching a list instead of just having a simple text field. (see screenshot)

They also have the ability to sort by multiple columns by clicking the up or down arrow in the headers. They can select and deselect the arrows and the columns are sorted in the order they were clicked or removed from the sort if the arrow that was selected is deselected.

The third feature is exporting to excel or word documents.

Hopefully these are possible to build with Wappler or you know of some workarounds.

Thanks in advance. Really hoping this is the solution I’ve been looking for!

[Dave]

You can achieve this with Wappler and a small amount of help from the community. Wappler has all the filtering you need, that is up to you entirely. You can select the columns to filter against in Server Connect, and base your results and repeat results within them, grouped, ordered, or otherwise. Can apply a multitude of filters client and server side. Can also easily plugin great scripts like Data Tables etc:

How to use DataTables.net

Head over to DataTables.net to pick which options you want for your data table. They have a number of configurable options including exporting, responsive tables and more. [image] Select if you want to download or use their CDN option and add the scripts to your page: [image] Set up your server connect and generate your table using the Wappler Table Generator (instructions here) By default, Data Tables doesn’t automatically refresh when your server connect loads so you need to run the data…

And it doesn’t stop there! You can export to CSV and Excel, and with plugins (second party scripts etc) and a little Flow here and there pretty much any scripts you want. The Word side is a little different and out of the box Wappler doesn’t support it but am sure you could work around it, and again am pretty sure there was a recent post on a user doing just that. For everything else there is this community. Try it out. Subscribe for a month and if you are happy and moving forward subscribe for another, and another, and another!

Welcome to Wappler by the way!

[TwitchBlade]

Thanks for the detailed reply, Dave. Very much appreciated. Nice to know the community is active and willing to help. I think I’m going to install the trial tomorrow and try and recreate a few pages from one of my client’s current web app for case management and see what happens. If successful, I’m getting a license for sure. I was about to start coding my own framework similar to Wappler but wasn’t looking forward to it haha

Thanks again!

[sid]

Hi,
I don’t think you will be able to get this level of customisation from Wappler’s built-in tools.
But, because Wappler is very flexible, you can integrate almost any JS plugin - if you have identified any that fit your criteria.
And, it also has advanced options to write your own custom formatters/modules in PHP & NodeJS type projects. It will be a lot of code and work, not a simple task. But it would be one time and, like you have written, you can reuse it for your other client’s projects.

[TwitchBlade]

Thanks for the reply Sid. The more I read through the documentation, the more I realize that the front end custom query and multi sort in particular would probably have to be custom coded as an extension or whatever Wappler uses to extend itself. I’ll have to see what options it offers. As I said, these features seem obvious to me but I have never found them in frameworks or if they are in a framework they are too opinionated and I need them to be more flexible. I used ProcessWire before and it has a “lister” for doing custom queries but at that time it didn’t work in the front end and it wasn’t quite flexible enough.

I’ll read up on what I’m in for as far as custom coding before downloading the trial. I do like all of the other features though so this may still end up in my toolbox.

Also the export features I need don’t seem to be there either and have been requested since 2018…

Export table to excel, csv, pdf like datatables.js

I would like to have functions for exporting a query (on click) to csv, excel or pdf. Just like jquery datatables.js has ready made ”buttons” for exporting a generated table view.