Double storage of values in table-field

Question

I'm currently creating some standard templates which should help to find good defaults for matrix output. This is where I stumpled upon the somehow weird structure of table data.

Here's a simplified structure of what I want to build:

<table>
{% for row in table %}
  <tr>
  {% for data in row %}
    <td>{{ data }}</td>
  {% endfor %}
  </tr>
{% endfor %}
</table>

Outputting table content like this:

{% for row in table %}
  {{ dump(row) }}
{% endfor %}

shows me that each row has double entries:

array(6) {
  ["col1"]=> string(7) "Hamburg"
  ["col2"]=> string(7) "1730000"
  ["col3"]=> string(7) "2600000"

  ["city"]=> string(7) "Hamburg"
  ["population"]=> string(7) "1730000"
  ["urbanPopulation"]=> string(7) "2600000"
}

While this might make sense in some cases, I don't get it. Why is this behavior and in which cases could the convention "col1", "col2", etc. make sense?

On first sight, this choice is very unfortunate as it prevents dynamic table output. Sure, you could use hacks like loop.index to target these, but that makes the code very unreadable and ugly.

Does anyone have the same issue with this?

Answer 1

The data is not stored twice in the database. I suspect that craft adds the additional array items when prepping the data, so that they can be referenced by either column number or column title.

But with a little finesse, you might be able to do something like the following, using key, value in the for loop and twig's slice filter:

<table>
    {% for row in entry.myTableFieldHandle %}
        <tr>
            {% for key, data in row if key|slice(0,3) == 'col' %}
                <td>{{ data }}</td>
            {% endfor %}
        </tr>
    {% endfor %}
</table>

Answer 2

Max - it looks like there might be an issue in how you are looping through the table. Table data is stored as JSON in the database, so calling entry.myTable should give you an array of rows, with each row as a sub-array of values.

From your example:

{% if entry.myTable | length %}
    <table>
        <thead>
            <td>City</td>
            <td>Population</td>
            <td>Urban Population</td>
        </thead>
        <tbody>
        {% for row in entry.myTable %}
            <tr>
                <td>{{row.city}}</td>
                <td>{{row.population}}</td>
                <td>{{row.urbanPopulation}}</td>
            </tr>
        {% endfor %}        
        </tbody>
    </table>
{% endif %}

will check to see if the table field exists and has data, then will go through each row, returning values by row.columnName.

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

Taken from carlcs' example, you'll probably want the clean "human readable" table headers. Looks like those aren't handed out in the template by default but you can get 'em with a trip to getFieldByHandle.

{% set field = craft.fields.getFieldByHandle('whateverField') %}

So something like this:

<table>
<tr>
<thead>
  {% set field = craft.fields.getFieldByHandle('whateverField') %}
  {% for column in field.settings.columns %}
    <th>{{ column.heading }}</th>
  {% endfor %}
</thead>

The just spit out the rest of the table like normal:

<tbody>
    {% for row in entry.whateverField %}
      <tr><td>{{ row.col1 }}</td><td>{{ row.col2 }}</td></tr>
    {% endfor %}
</tbody>        
</tr>   
</table>

If your table is within a matrix block—which complicates things—you need to do some additional finagling. The above link will show how to do that.

Answer 4

Craft's Table Field Type probably isn't the right choice, if this is what you want to achieve:

So if my client created new tables, which I did not manually implement, they get output fine.

The Table Field Type isn't really meant to be created by users. Besides column names, the user also has to configure the field handle and add the field to the right Entry Type in the Settings section of the CP.

Then there's also the problem with dynamically accessing the field with an unknown handle from the template.

{% for row in entry.unknownTableFieldHandle %}
{% endfor %}

But there's this new plugin by Supercool: Table Maker. This should do exactly what you want (see the field's template syntax), plus it allows the user to define the table columns.

{% for row in entry.myTableFieldHandle.rows %}
    <tr>
        {% for cell in row %}
            <td>{{ cell }}<td>
        {% endfor %}
    </tr>
{% endfor %}