Getting Handsontable to work with QuickBase

This seems like a pretty severe action to take to try to make QuickBase work like excel. At least from my perspective. Thousands of users have moved on from Excel to QuickBase without requiring this sort of control. 

However, it is pretty cool at the same time. IOL will work at the table level if you make your IOL field a default field or make sure it is on all your reports. 

When you have IOL, you can have it call a code page, which is where you would store the code for this. Not all the features of Handsontable will work though, such as merging cells, though many of the other features would be pretty neat to see in use. 

Another thing to consider is to create a push button solution that bypasses the native quickbase all together and presents your data in a 100% controllable environment where you can use the Handsontable software without the QuickBase DOM getting in the way. 

If you have strong desires to get this working, have some budget, and need some help with it, contact our team via the info in my profile. While we don't have a handsontable implementation, we do have some of our own homegrown table environments that might also solve the problem. Either way, I am sure we can help.

Good Luck!

In reality, all our company needs from Handsontable is filtering like Excel.  The rest is of no real value, but may come in handy.  Yes we have to move on from Excel, but QB is seriously lacking in its filtering ability.  Sorting a column is fine, but we need to be able to filter data in anyway way we want-quickly.  

We can build several "standard" dynamic filters that will accomplish filtering our projects in ways that we need on a continuing basis.  The issue lies in the fact that often we need to find a number of projects, via a project number, that is a one-off situation.  Our data is like everyone else's data, projects and the associated information, but we get requests from our client for a set of projects that match a specific criteria, and this is a one off.

In Excel, we can go to a column and type in project numbers (as a grouping) and get back results for that number of projects.  We may also need to know which projects are located at a certain place, or are in a certain order.  Going in and creating a dynamic filter for each of these one-offs is very time consuming.  What we can do with 2-4 clicks in Excel's filtering takes more typing and time in QB to accomplish.

QB is a very good platform, but there are reasons that people continue to use spreadsheets, like Excel.  The filtering of data is much faster and there are no limits to the number of data points when making a plot.  I have been working with IOL and calling D3 so the plotting part is getting easier to understand.

I asked Handsontable if they would just provide the filtering part of their code since it is exactly what we need.  They said "Nope".  It may turn out that we come to CirrusOps to get this 1 thing implemented, but until my group makes a decision to move forward finally with the transition to QB, I am still just playing and learning how to use the software.

Thanks to you, Matthew, and Dan for the help that y'all provide to me as I ask the very simple questions.

Cheers!

I have been away last week and just getting back to accumulated emails and followups.. I have used Handsontable with QuickBase and it works extremely well if you need some of its features.

Feel free to contact me off-world using the information in my profile if you need specific assistance using Handontable with QuickBase:

https://getsatisfaction.com/people/dandiebolt

As an alternative, you might be able to use a Chrome Extension to manipulate (sort, filter, copy data etc) QuickBase's table reports:

https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+extension+table+sort

These extensions inspect the raw HTML structure of tables and provide various ways to manipulate them. Since these extensions work on any web page containing tables there may be some aspects you cannot fully control. One feature they could not provide any functionality for is manipulation of reports that span several pages as they only work on the current page and have no knowledge of how QuickBase has structured their reports.

Hi Neil,

Did you come to a solution for this?

Thanks.

I did, with tons of help from Dan.  I am too incompetent to explain, but get in touch with Dan off-world and he would be happy to help I'm pretty sure.  He's a great resource here, crazy knowledgeable.

also crazy busy at the moment ...

Thank you both for your replies. Without going into detail, perhaps either of you can confirm one quick thing. We currently have a way to implement by embedding an iframe on a standard QB page and loading the HTML for Handsontable through that. Would you be able to confirm if this was the solution or if more involved?

Email me at nshepard@ucseng.com and I will try to help with my extremely limited knowledge.  I am in very early stages with JavaScript and only know what iframes are.  I can help you with what Dan setup since he's busy now (and hey I can stop asking for a minute and answer something!!!!)

You don't need to use an <iframe> and doing so might create a trapped in iframe issue

However depending on the exact source you are using for Handsontable the logic wrapper that loads the library may be detecting that QuickBase uses requirejs as the module loader when you think you are loading Handsontable through a global. If you are using Handsontable through a html code page as the src attribute of the <iframe>  that the library is probably loading as a global as you are not using requirejs in your code page.