Gridx in XPages – 15: Adding QuickFilter for Full-Text Searching

The QuickFilter module provides simple full-text search functionality to a grid. In this post, I’ll show how to use it and how it works.

Gridx Series

Gridx in XPages — Entire Series

The QuickFilter module adds a text box and icon to the top right area of the grid.

Once you type a value to search for in the box, it will automatically filter the data. (It appears to start after you pause typing.) You can also trigger the search by clicking on the filter icon to the right.

In this example, I typed ‘pa’ into the box. It filtered the list to people who live in Pennsylvania or have a first or last name that includes ‘pa’.

Once a search has been executed, you can click the ‘x’ icon in the right side of the search box to clear the results. If you change the search string, it will execute a new search over the entire data store; it does not search the filtered results.

It does not seem to support anything other than simple text searching (i.e. no wildcards or logical operators to combine search terms).

Sorting Search Results

If you have a sorting module in the grid (such as NestedSort, in my example), you can sort the filtered results.

Implementing QuickFilter

Adding QuickFilter is very straightforward; you just need to add two more modules to the grid.

Here’s the updated require() in my example:

require([ 
  "gridx/Grid", 
  "dojo/store/Memory",
  "gridx/core/model/cache/Sync", 
  "gridx/modules/ColumnResizer",
  "gridx/modules/NestedSort", 
  "gridx/modules/Filter",
  "gridx/modules/filter/QuickFilter",
  "dojo/domReady!" ], 
  function(Grid, MemoryStore, Cache, Resizer, NestedSort, Filter, QuickFilter) {

And here is the updated grid object:

grid = new Grid({ 
  id: "my_gridX", 
  cacheClass: Cache, 
  store: store, 
  structure: columns, 
  modules: [ 
    Resizer, 
    NestedSort,
    Filter,
    QuickFilter
  ] 
});

That’s it!

Local Data Only

Note: This will only work simply on a local data store, so I am using an AJAX request to pull the data from a REST service locally.

If you are using a remote data store, you’ll need to filter the data server-side before sending it client-side.

Unique IDs Required

Note: If your REST service provides data from a categorized row or a totals row at the end, it can cause filtering functionality not to work properly. This is because the grid requires each row to have a unique ID (which we’ve set to use NoteID in our examples), but category rows and totals rows don’t represent documents so they do not include a NoteID.

It does not cause an obvious error but filtering doesn’t work, the page freezes and you eventually get a message asking you about stopping or debugging JavaScript.

Up Next

In the next post, we’ll look at the FilterBar module, which provides much more advanced searching functionality.