- When scrolling a large dataset (more than a few dozen rows), the client-side control loads a fixed number of records from the server. When these records are exhausted, the UI is pre-empted to load the next set of records.
- Developers have no control. Missing API features are: the page size (number of records to load at a time), and the number of pages to load ahead of time (buffering).
- The scroll bar resizes with each new set of data. This means it cannot be used to navigate a dataset - its primary purpose.
- A simple column selector.
- Users have to go through the personalization UI. Most controls provide a context menu available on right-click to select columns.
- Wrapped headers.
- Text in headers cannot wrap, leading to truncated labels where there are more than a trivial number of columns.
- A functioning scrollbar.
- Current scrollbar resizes every time a new data page is loaded (as the user scrolls down). As a result, the scrollbar cannot be used to navigate a dataset - it's primary purpose.
- Hierarchical presentation of records.
- Many controls allow nesting, providing a visual indication of hierarchical lists. We're limited
- Frozen (pinned) columns
- Allowing user-specified collumns to remain visible on the left side while the control is scrolled left-to-right.
- Grouping and summary.
- Grouping by user-selected columns, and providing a summary row below.
- Functioning paste or fill-down.
- Selection works at a record-level initially, rather than providing focus to the cell a user clicks in (or keyboard navigates to).
- Users therefore cannot copy/paste a value from a point (x,y) in a grid to a point (x, y+1). This is a very common operation when working with tabular data, and moving the to Excel and back is not feasible in many scenarios.
- Programmatic formatting of the contents of single cells.
- Fabric UI React List control used in Office 365:https://dev.office.com/fabric#/components/list
- Fabric UI JS List control: https://dev.office.com/fabric-js/Components/List/List.html
- Kendo UI grid: http://demos.telerik.com/kendo-ui/grid/index
- JQWidgets' jqxgrid: https://www.jqwidgets.com/jquery-widgets-demo/demos/jqxgrid/index.htm
Generally, the grid started off incomplete in AX7, and since release, has fallen farther behind most other business applications. Please evaluate these (and other!) gaps for inclusion in platform updates.
Comments
Hi there. Can you provide an update to this suggestion? It's been several months. We await improvements to the grid control with great anticipation at each platform update. Thank!
Category: User Experience
Thanks for the comment. We have many of the features listed in our internal analysis of the capabilities of the AX grid and its strengths and weaknesses. You're welcome to get in touch for details. Which scenarios are you most interested in?
It's a challenge to split these out into single suggestions on ideas.dynamics.com as individual suggestions are very specific and get buried in the list. The experience using the forms becomes less functional because of the aggregate lack of functionality.
Category: User Experience
Jason Green (administrator) on 3/3/2020 11:18:18 PM
A new grid control for Finance and Operations apps is available for public preview starting in 10.0.9 / Platform update 33. This includes the replacement grid control featuring faster rendering, smoother scrolling (due to more aggressive pre-loading of data), and improved handling of larger datasets. There are no plans to adjust the infinite scrolling behavior of grids in Finance and Operations apps (this is required since the size of the full dataset is often unknown); however, the new grid does provide positional scrolling within the data that has been loaded on the client.
Additional capabilities that are included with the new grid include totals, grouping, and fast data entry. Fast data entry includes the ability to paste a table (rows and columns) from Excel starting in a single cell of the grid. The ability to freeze (pin) columns is also being targeted with the new grid. Programmatic formatting of cells can be achieved using the displayOption() API. If there are extra capabilities in this space, please log a separate suggestion in the Ideas portal describing those.
Note that not all the capabilities described in this suggestion are currently planned (see the list below). These should be logged individually as other suggestions for tracking.
Items from this suggestion that are not currently planned:
- Developer APIs to control page size and number of pages to load ahead of time
- Wrapped headers
- Ability to show generic hierarchical data in a grid
- Excel-like fill-down capabilities