Go Scroll Yourself! blocks only (No extensions, No JavaScript)

This tutorial is intended for people who need to display a heavily customized scrollable window into a large table. It can also be used as a CardView.
(I needed a pithy title, and "The Elder Scrolls" was taken.)

My sample subject area for my data is the historical or current set of legislators in the US Congress, both Representatives and Senators, with photos (where available.)

Credits for the source data:

Source code:
table_window.aia (508.1 KB)

I have embedded my two source CSV tables in the assets of my .aia file for load at startup, but the photos are loaded dynamically from the congressional bioguide site when the app user stops scrolling, to reduce the chances of the app acting like Denial Of Service attack.

The columns for my sample data files are the same, only the time spans differ.


The historical data table is quite sparse, given the 18th century data.

This sample is all about the scrolling.

Things I did not bother with for this sample:

  • Choosing which file to load (historical/current)
  • filtering
  • sorting

Sample run, using current data:

The Designer (overview):

From outside in, the table view consists of

  • a nonscrolling Screen1
  • a Horizontal Arrangement holding the table window and the scroll bar
    • a Vertical Arrangement stacking at least 3 table row details
    • a Vertical Arrangement stacking
      • an Up button
      • a thin (10%) Canvas
      • a Down button

The table row details are Designer copies (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V) of the first table row detail Arrangement, which was the finickiest part of the app, trying to squeeze in data from 7 columns of the CSV file:


Note how I renamed the important Labels to reflect their contents, with a terminal '1' for AI2 autonumbering when I copied and pasted the enclosing HorizontalArrangement1 inside the Vertical Arrangement varDetails.

When you have copied (Ctrl-C) the first detail Arrangement, be sure to click (focus) on the enclosing Vertical Arrangement so the Ctrl-V pastes land the copies into the proper container, after your first detail Arrangement.

Once I have a well named collection of display components, it's time to collect them in the Blocks Editor to support iteration over the display:


Notice how the three rows of components appear in the same order as they are displayed, to keep things simple. The actual input order of the corresponding CSV table columns is in

The WebViewers are in a separate list:

Initialization:


I left out niceties like choosing which file to load.

For debugging, I copied the incoming file to a global variable before doing CSV to Table conversion.

I copied the first row (headers) for safekeeping in case I would use it later. (I didn't)
Then I removed the first row, leaving only data rows.

The scrolling relies on a global variable
initialize global listOffset to
, initially 0, intended to hold how far down we have scrolled, measured in row count.

At startup, all three parts of the table display need to be loaded:

  • the Canvas scroll bar
  • the Labels
  • the WebViewers


I did not bother to parametrize the shared global variables holding the source and display tables


Drawing a scroll bar consists of

  • erasing the scroll Canvas
  • mapping the offset (0 - source table length) into a y value
  • setting the scroll bar length to show the ratio of source to output table lengths
  • drawing the scroll bar as a fat line down the center (x) of the Canvas

Filling the Labels:


I hardwired the source and target tables here. Feel free to parameterize them as needed.

To avoid running off the end of either table when looping through the indices of the target table, I limit a local copy of the offset using the minimum function.
That lets me fill the entire Label table. (This might need further work if you start to filter the source table so far that its length is less than the length of the Label table.)

Once I have lined up a row of Labels and a row of data from the source data table, it is time to fill in the Labels of that row from that data row. This is where the list of source column numbers is needed:


That list maps the seven Labels into the corresponding input table column numbers, to allow the Labels to filled in a loop.

Loading the Photos:

The outer layers of this procedure were copied from the load_labels procedure, since the same logic applies to lining up source rows and target components.

The URL for each photo is built using column 23 of the source table and the URL prefix

The bioguide web site keeps 26 alphabetical subdirectories of photos based on the first letter of the last name, hence the extra work building a URL to scrape the photo.

Controlling the Scroll:

The Up and Down buttons:

The Up Button has to watch out that it doesn't run off the top (item 1) of the source table.

The Down Button has to watch out for the ends (length of list) of both the source (legislators) table and target (Labels) table.

The Canvas controls:

The y value of the Canvas touch point needs to be mapped into a new offset into the source (legislators) table.

To avoid overloading the Congressional photos site, we don't bother trying to load photos during a drag.


Eventually we have to remove our finger from the scroll canvas. That's a good time to complete our web scrape.

Summary:

I have shown

  • a sample table load from a file
  • how to set up nested Arrangements for a small fixed number of detail rows
  • how to line up the scroll bar Vertical Arrangement with the detail rows
  • how to maintain a global offset variable to match the target display components into the source data table
  • how to dynamically show the scroll effect in the scroll bar and in Labels during a drag
  • how to avoid overloading a web source during a drag.

I have not shown

9 Likes

A meat and two veg, very practical and well explained method ABG.

2 Likes

Wow, very useful @ABG!

@TimAI2 has some nice code in a private exchange in this thread where he uses a ListView's MainText to hold a text JOIN of individual row items, interspersed with '\n' and other formatting.

I hope he will make it public for us.

I also invite other ideas for table display techniques to this thread.

1 Like

As requested, here is my take on creating a similar display to that generated above by @ABG, just using the ListView component. Needs much more work to do all the things that @ABG 's does. I reduced the data in the csv file offline, and only used one image (it was late...)

You can use the list view to return image, main text or detail text on click if you so wish

Image size was set to 400x300 (must be dp...Susan...?)

You may notice I put two spaces at the beginning of each line (there is no padding/margin between the image and the text ...Susan...)

4 Likes

great guide never thought of ddos via webviewer would be like this easy , but it's good way to drain bandwidth of limited hosting servers

It's not a good idea to rely on internet based images because websites are often changed, making the URL for the images void. It also forces the App to only work properly online.

3 Likes

These are all valid points.

It depends on

  • how large is the back-end photo store, compared to
    • your download (space/time) capacity?
    • AI2 assets and .aia file space limitations?
  • how many photos do you plan to view before you decide you've seen enough?
  • do you need to use the app offline?
  • how disposable is your app, compared to the attention span of your users?

My personal attention span is at the gumball machine level.
imageimageimage

If any one has solutions for the other use cases, please feel free to post or link to them here.

As an addendum to this tutorial, here is a small addition to take care of the case where the input table has fewer data rows than the displayed Label tabel.

This approach maintains full visibility for all cells, but clears the .Text values of all cells before trying to fill the displayed cells from the (possibly short) input data table.


The clear_labels procedure clears out the text of a given Label table.

The load_labels procedure calls clear_labels before trying to load the labels from the incoming data.

Revised .aia file:
table_window.aia (508.4 KB)

1 Like

What I need to change to display the list in textboxes "1 list to many textboxes"