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My colleagues and I are arguing which grid plugin is best and we each have valid arguments, but we can't seem to reach a conclusion. So here is my question, why is slickgrid better than flexigrid?

KO.
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  • does your grid have to be sortable and use 3rd party plugin in the first place? Just thinking of other possibilities. – micadelli Apr 03 '13 at 09:34

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I looked into Flexigrid when I had to choose/try new grids and I ended up choosing SlickGrid and I'm telling you it's a much better choice.

SlickGrid::

  • SlickGrid Constantly evolving on GitHub, there's commit almost every week
  • It has a disadvantage though, it needs to load all the data first before you can do anything, while it's fast to populate fake data in javascript (demos), it's much longer to pull the data from the DB.
  • The disadvantage becomes an advantage once after you have the data, once loaded it's FAST really fast, grouping, sorting 50k or even 500k rows
  • Since you need to load data first, it's long and it's consumming bandwith, but once you have it loaded, anything play you do with the data is afterward done on the client machine, for example sorting, grouping, filtering, etc... all that is done on client side (because of the dataview that exist as a javascript object)
  • It now support multiple columns grouping (nested grouping) which I helped implement
  • You can easily format (formatters) any columns you want, for example display a country flag logo instead of just the name.

now Flexigrid::

  • Flexigrid last commit was 2 years ago (excluding demos)
  • Can you format any column with it, I don't think so..?
  • The SlickGrid disadvantage becomes an advantage for Flexigrid (loading all data first) but only if you never change page in Flexigrid. But here's the main difference though, Flexigrid will do a query to the DB (and you have to deal with the page query) at every page you change, so you constantly need a connection to the DB, in SlickGrid once it's loaded you don't need the DB anymore (unless you're doing insert/update).
  • I did not see multiple columns grouping in Flexigrid

Obviously I'm more on SlickGrid and I admit that I barely tried Flexgrid, but there's no evolution on it...

ghiscoding
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    You don't need to load the data first in SlickGrid. That's up to the developer. If you'd like to make use of SlickGrid's data provider class - DataView - which has lots of useful features, then yes, you do need to load all the data so it can manipulate it on the client. But you can also load the data via AJAX just the same. – Tin Apr 03 '13 at 17:12
  • Yes good point, maybe I should be more specific, I do use only DataView class in all my implementations. Nonetheless with this object use, it is longer to load data once but when it's loaded then it's super fast since it's all on client side afterwards and your DataView is full of sweet features/options :) – ghiscoding Apr 03 '13 at 17:33