Getting Started with AG Grid and React – The Best Javascript Grid in the World

Rate this content
Bookmark

Does your React app need to efficiently display lots (and lots) of data in a grid? Do your users want to be able to search, sort, filter, and edit data? AG Grid is the best JavaScript grid in the world and is packed with features, highly performant, and extensible. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to get started with AG Grid, how we can enable sorting and filtering of data in the grid, cell rendering, and more. You will walk away from this free 3-hour workshop equipped with the knowledge for implementing AG Grid into your React application.


We all know that rolling our own grid solution is not easy, and let's be honest, is not something that we should be working on. We are focused on building a product and driving forward innovation. In this workshop, you'll see just how easy it is to get started with AG Grid.


Prerequisites: 

Basic React and JavaScript


Workshop level:

Beginner

This workshop has been presented at React Advanced Conference 2022, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.

FAQ

To enable cell editing in AG Grid, set the 'editable' property to true in the column definition. For example, use 'editable: true' to make a column editable. Additionally, you can specify a cell editor like 'AG large text cell editor' for a custom editing experience.

To customize AG Grid themes, you can override global CSS styles, use theme parameters, CSS variables, or SASS mixins and functions. Start with a pre-built theme such as Alpine or Material and customize it using CSS variables for properties like background color, foreground color, and border color.

AG Grid provides several built-in cell editors including the text cell editor, large text cell editor, date editor, and select editor. For more advanced options, the enterprise version offers a rich select editor.

To handle data persistence after cell editing in AG Grid, you can use the 'onCellValueChanged' event to capture changes and update your data source. For immutable data handling, use the 'onCellEditRequest' event in read-only mode and update the data manually.

Yes, you can apply conditional styles to cells in AG Grid using the 'cellClassRules' property in the column definition. This property allows you to add and remove CSS classes based on specific conditions defined in a callback function.

The recommended method to update cell values in AG Grid is by using the 'valueSetter' function. This function allows you to specify how cell values should be updated and can return true or false to indicate if the update should trigger a cell refresh.

To customize row styles in AG Grid, use the 'rowStyle', 'getRowStyle', 'rowClass', 'getRowClass', and 'rowClassRules' properties on the AG Grid React component. These allow you to apply inline styles, CSS classes, and conditional class rules to rows.

Brian Love
Brian Love
140 min
11 Oct, 2022

Comments

Sign in or register to post your comment.

Video Summary and Transcription

This workshop is about AG Grid, a JavaScript grid with great performance and an ergonomic API. It covers installation, column definitions, row data, sorting, filtering, cell rendering, editing, and styling. The workshop includes exercises to practice hands-on coding. It also explores advanced topics such as value getters, formatters, cell renderers, and custom cell editors. Additionally, it covers persisting data, handling cell value changes, and styling cells and rows using cell classes, styles, and themes.

1. Introduction to Workshop

Short description:

Welcome to the workshop! Today we're learning about HP Grid as part of the React Advanced Conference. I'm Bryan Love, co-founder of Live Love App, and I'm joined by Mike Ryan. We're both Google Developer Experts and Cypress Ambassadors. We'll be taking breaks every hour during this three-hour workshop. Feel free to ask any questions you may have.

All right, like I said, welcome to the workshop. Today we're going to be learning about HP Grid as part of the React Advanced Conference. My name is Bryan Love and Mike and I are co-founders of a consultancy called Live Love App. We're both Google Developer Experts and Cypress Ambassadors and we like to contribute to open source. So anything you want to add there, Mike? I know I kind of introduced you as well.

Nope, just I'm Mike Ryan, also from Portland. Both heavily involved in open source, though mostly in the Angular space, an A-G grid space. We're gonna do just a quick housekeeping, just make sure everybody's in the same page here. We are all abiding by and under the code of conduct. If you haven't looked at that, that's on the React Advanced website. Scroll all the way down to the bottom in the footer and you'll see a link to code of conduct. So just please be aware of that and let's all be nice to each other for the next couple of hours and have a good time. We are gonna take a break every hour. So this is a three-hour workshop. We've got plenty of content, lots of hands-on exercises for everybody but we do want to make sure that we just take a break, give you an opportunity to step away, get something to drink, stretch. Kind of helps in the learning process, too, rather than just sitting in front of a computer for three hours straight. And then if you have any questions, Mike and I are here to answer any questions you may have. So go ahead and put those questions in the chat or you can just kind of raise your hand and let us know that you have a question.

2. Introduction to AG Grid Workshop

Short description:

The prereqs for this workshop are JavaScript and TypeScript, and basic React. AG Grid is the best JavaScript grid with great performance, extensibility, and an ergonomic API. We'll be using the AG Grid with React course on our website. All course content and exercises are available online using StackBlitz. We'll cover installation, column definitions, row data, sorting, filtering, cell rendering, editing, and styling of AG Grid.

The prereqs for this workshop are pretty easy. We just need to make sure that we all know and have a little bit of understanding about JavaScript and TypeScript, and then also some basic React.

As I already mentioned, AG Grid is the best JavaScript grid in the world. That's kind of their tagline. You can check out their website at ag-grid.com and kind of find out more information about AG Grid. They have some great documentation there, lots of great examples, et cetera. And so you might be wondering what makes AG Grid so great. And in my opinion, I think it really comes down to three things.

First of all, it's the performance of AG Grid. AG Grid is really fast and it's very well optimized for handling loads of data that you want to put inside of a grid in the DOM. It does all kinds of virtualization of columns and rows to make sure that it doesn't, you know, slow down the frame rate of your application. Make sure you get some really good performance out of your web app.

The next thing that I really like about AG Grid is the extensibility of it. Well, AG Grid comes with a ton of features out of the box. What's nice about AG Grid is that through using components, we can extend AG Grid to make it kind of customized to whatever app we're building. So if we need a particular cell to display something really interesting or really interactive, we can do that. And so the extensibility of AG Grid is fantastic. And so they've built the product with a large feature set, but also with the extensibility, knowing that you're going to want to kind of customize it as necessary.

And then finally, I really think that there's a nice ergonomic API to AG Grid. It is a very large API. The surface is very large, but once you kind of get used to it, the naming conventions are fairly easy to kind of understand and almost kind of guess. So the ergonomic API makes it a great product as well.

So today we're going to be using our website, lidloveapp.com, courses. So if you go ahead and pull that up on your browser, you should see that we have a couple of courses listed there. This is technically like a private page, but we kind of believe in security through obscurity. So feel free to pull that up and choose the AG Grid with React course that's in the middle, and that's what we're going to be using this morning or this evening, whatever time it is for you. And that's what we're going to be using today to kind of go through the course content. So all the course content is online and freely available, and will be available to you after this workshop. And then all of our exercises we're going to be doing online as well. So we'll be using StackBlitz in order to do that. So you don't need to have anything installed, or you don't need to download AG Grid or anything like that. We're just going to be doing it all on the browser. So with that said, go ahead. I'm going to stop sharing this screen, and I'm going to switch over to Chrome. Pull up little app.com slash courses. And when you do so you should see this website and then go ahead and scroll down and click on the Getting Started with AG Grid and React. And here's our table of contents for today. Like I said, this is going to be a three-hour workshop, we're going to take a break every hour to get started with. We're going to go over kind of how you install AG Grid with React. So real simple, we're not going to do that because we're going to be using StackWisps today, but just to kind of make you familiar with how simple it is to get started with AG Grid. Then we're going to be talking about column definitions. And we'll look at row data, row sorting, the default column definition and filtering. We'll then look at cell rendering and how that works. We'll kind of talk about the cell rendering pipeline. We'll be looking at using custom value getters value formatters and a cell renderer function. And then we'll get into cell editing. We'll talk about the provided cell editors that kind of come out of the box with AG Grid. Then we'll look at how you can create your own custom cell editor using a component and how we can persist data. And then finally, we'll get into the styling of AG Grid. So AG Grid comes out of the box with a couple of different themes, and you can customize those themes. But we can also take that a step further, and we can do things like cell styling and row styling. And we'll take a look at those themes and how we can customize them.

Watch more workshops on topic

React Performance Debugging Masterclass
React Summit 2023React Summit 2023
170 min
React Performance Debugging Masterclass
Top Content
Featured WorkshopFree
Ivan Akulov
Ivan Akulov
Ivan’s first attempts at performance debugging were chaotic. He would see a slow interaction, try a random optimization, see that it didn't help, and keep trying other optimizations until he found the right one (or gave up).
Back then, Ivan didn’t know how to use performance devtools well. He would do a recording in Chrome DevTools or React Profiler, poke around it, try clicking random things, and then close it in frustration a few minutes later. Now, Ivan knows exactly where and what to look for. And in this workshop, Ivan will teach you that too.
Here’s how this is going to work. We’ll take a slow app → debug it (using tools like Chrome DevTools, React Profiler, and why-did-you-render) → pinpoint the bottleneck → and then repeat, several times more. We won’t talk about the solutions (in 90% of the cases, it’s just the ol’ regular useMemo() or memo()). But we’ll talk about everything that comes before – and learn how to analyze any React performance problem, step by step.
(Note: This workshop is best suited for engineers who are already familiar with how useMemo() and memo() work – but want to get better at using the performance tools around React. Also, we’ll be covering interaction performance, not load speed, so you won’t hear a word about Lighthouse 🤐)
Concurrent Rendering Adventures in React 18
React Advanced Conference 2021React Advanced Conference 2021
132 min
Concurrent Rendering Adventures in React 18
Top Content
Featured WorkshopFree
Maurice de Beijer
Maurice de Beijer
With the release of React 18 we finally get the long awaited concurrent rendering. But how is that going to affect your application? What are the benefits of concurrent rendering in React? What do you need to do to switch to concurrent rendering when you upgrade to React 18? And what if you don’t want or can’t use concurrent rendering yet?

There are some behavior changes you need to be aware of! In this workshop we will cover all of those subjects and more.

Join me with your laptop in this interactive workshop. You will see how easy it is to switch to concurrent rendering in your React application. You will learn all about concurrent rendering, SuspenseList, the startTransition API and more.
React Hooks Tips Only the Pros Know
React Summit Remote Edition 2021React Summit Remote Edition 2021
177 min
React Hooks Tips Only the Pros Know
Top Content
Featured Workshop
Maurice de Beijer
Maurice de Beijer
The addition of the hooks API to React was quite a major change. Before hooks most components had to be class based. Now, with hooks, these are often much simpler functional components. Hooks can be really simple to use. Almost deceptively simple. Because there are still plenty of ways you can mess up with hooks. And it often turns out there are many ways where you can improve your components a better understanding of how each React hook can be used.You will learn all about the pros and cons of the various hooks. You will learn when to use useState() versus useReducer(). We will look at using useContext() efficiently. You will see when to use useLayoutEffect() and when useEffect() is better.
React, TypeScript, and TDD
React Advanced Conference 2021React Advanced Conference 2021
174 min
React, TypeScript, and TDD
Top Content
Featured WorkshopFree
Paul Everitt
Paul Everitt
ReactJS is wildly popular and thus wildly supported. TypeScript is increasingly popular, and thus increasingly supported.

The two together? Not as much. Given that they both change quickly, it's hard to find accurate learning materials.

React+TypeScript, with JetBrains IDEs? That three-part combination is the topic of this series. We'll show a little about a lot. Meaning, the key steps to getting productive, in the IDE, for React projects using TypeScript. Along the way we'll show test-driven development and emphasize tips-and-tricks in the IDE.
Web3 Workshop - Building Your First Dapp
React Advanced Conference 2021React Advanced Conference 2021
145 min
Web3 Workshop - Building Your First Dapp
Top Content
Featured WorkshopFree
Nader Dabit
Nader Dabit
In this workshop, you'll learn how to build your first full stack dapp on the Ethereum blockchain, reading and writing data to the network, and connecting a front end application to the contract you've deployed. By the end of the workshop, you'll understand how to set up a full stack development environment, run a local node, and interact with any smart contract using React, HardHat, and Ethers.js.
Designing Effective Tests With React Testing Library
React Summit 2023React Summit 2023
151 min
Designing Effective Tests With React Testing Library
Top Content
Featured Workshop
Josh Justice
Josh Justice
React Testing Library is a great framework for React component tests because there are a lot of questions it answers for you, so you don’t need to worry about those questions. But that doesn’t mean testing is easy. There are still a lot of questions you have to figure out for yourself: How many component tests should you write vs end-to-end tests or lower-level unit tests? How can you test a certain line of code that is tricky to test? And what in the world are you supposed to do about that persistent act() warning?
In this three-hour workshop we’ll introduce React Testing Library along with a mental model for how to think about designing your component tests. This mental model will help you see how to test each bit of logic, whether or not to mock dependencies, and will help improve the design of your components. You’ll walk away with the tools, techniques, and principles you need to implement low-cost, high-value component tests.
Table of contents- The different kinds of React application tests, and where component tests fit in- A mental model for thinking about the inputs and outputs of the components you test- Options for selecting DOM elements to verify and interact with them- The value of mocks and why they shouldn’t be avoided- The challenges with asynchrony in RTL tests and how to handle them
Prerequisites- Familiarity with building applications with React- Basic experience writing automated tests with Jest or another unit testing framework- You do not need any experience with React Testing Library- Machine setup: Node LTS, Yarn

Check out more articles and videos

We constantly think of articles and videos that might spark Git people interest / skill us up or help building a stellar career

A Guide to React Rendering Behavior
React Advanced Conference 2022React Advanced Conference 2022
25 min
A Guide to React Rendering Behavior
Top Content
This transcription provides a brief guide to React rendering behavior. It explains the process of rendering, comparing new and old elements, and the importance of pure rendering without side effects. It also covers topics such as batching and double rendering, optimizing rendering and using context and Redux in React. Overall, it offers valuable insights for developers looking to understand and optimize React rendering.
Building Better Websites with Remix
React Summit Remote Edition 2021React Summit Remote Edition 2021
33 min
Building Better Websites with Remix
Top Content
Remix is a web framework built on React Router that focuses on web fundamentals, accessibility, performance, and flexibility. It delivers real HTML and SEO benefits, and allows for automatic updating of meta tags and styles. It provides features like login functionality, session management, and error handling. Remix is a server-rendered framework that can enhance sites with JavaScript but doesn't require it for basic functionality. It aims to create quality HTML-driven documents and is flexible for use with different web technologies and stacks.
Scaling Up with Remix and Micro Frontends
Remix Conf Europe 2022Remix Conf Europe 2022
23 min
Scaling Up with Remix and Micro Frontends
Top Content
This talk discusses the usage of Microfrontends in Remix and introduces the Tiny Frontend library. Kazoo, a used car buying platform, follows a domain-driven design approach and encountered issues with granular slicing. Tiny Frontend aims to solve the slicing problem and promotes type safety and compatibility of shared dependencies. The speaker demonstrates how Tiny Frontend works with server-side rendering and how Remix can consume and update components without redeploying the app. The talk also explores the usage of micro frontends and the future support for Webpack Module Federation in Remix.
React Compiler - Understanding Idiomatic React (React Forget)
React Advanced Conference 2023React Advanced Conference 2023
33 min
React Compiler - Understanding Idiomatic React (React Forget)
Top Content
Watch video: React Compiler - Understanding Idiomatic React (React Forget)
Joe Savona
Mofei Zhang
2 authors
The Talk discusses React Forget, a compiler built at Meta that aims to optimize client-side React development. It explores the use of memoization to improve performance and the vision of Forget to automatically determine dependencies at build time. Forget is named with an F-word pun and has the potential to optimize server builds and enable dead code elimination. The team plans to make Forget open-source and is focused on ensuring its quality before release.
Using useEffect Effectively
React Advanced Conference 2022React Advanced Conference 2022
30 min
Using useEffect Effectively
Top Content
Today's Talk explores the use of the useEffect hook in React development, covering topics such as fetching data, handling race conditions and cleanup, and optimizing performance. It also discusses the correct use of useEffect in React 18, the distinction between Activity Effects and Action Effects, and the potential misuse of useEffect. The Talk highlights the benefits of using useQuery or SWR for data fetching, the problems with using useEffect for initializing global singletons, and the use of state machines for handling effects. The speaker also recommends exploring the beta React docs and using tools like the stately.ai editor for visualizing state machines.
Routing in React 18 and Beyond
React Summit 2022React Summit 2022
20 min
Routing in React 18 and Beyond
Top Content
Routing in React 18 brings a native app-like user experience and allows applications to transition between different environments. React Router and Next.js have different approaches to routing, with React Router using component-based routing and Next.js using file system-based routing. React server components provide the primitives to address the disadvantages of multipage applications while maintaining the same user experience. Improving navigation and routing in React involves including loading UI, pre-rendering parts of the screen, and using server components for more performant experiences. Next.js and Remix are moving towards a converging solution by combining component-based routing with file system routing.