Back to all articles

Improve usability of your tables with Dolly.js

dolly.js logoWhen dealing with user-defined data tables, spreadsheet software is an infinite source of UI inspirations. The well known gesture of dragging a handle in the bottom-right cell corner to clone the contents is one them. Now, we bring this functionality to your tables.

Avoid repetitive work

Assume you are filling a timetable of sort. You laboriously scheduled all day and then realized that three consecutive weeks are going to be the same. What do you do? It’s obvious – just drag a square handle in the cell you’ve just filled and select all cells that should have the same content. It’s trivial for anyone who has ever seen MS Excel (namely – most of the users out there). And it’s exactly the functionality you can add to your tables with Dolly.js.

Easy to use with any table

Dolly.js is a jQuery UI widget without any other dependencies. It adds the UI behavior, leaving the data logic implementation up to you. Therefore you can use Dolly with any data structure, no matter how complicated it is. And it’s markup-independent so if you aren’t using a semantic HTML table, Dolly can handle it.

Wow, great! Where can I get it?

GitHub: http://github.com/LunarLogic/dolly.js

Live examples and documentation: http://lunarlogic.github.io/dolly.js/

You are also welcome to share your feedback or code contributions with us!

Share this article: