datasette-ui-extras 0.11

Adds UI enhancements to Datasette

datasette-ui-extras

This plugin collects UI tweaks that people have proposed for Datasette. You can see a demo at https://dux-demo.fly.dev/

Compared to core Datasette, this plugin is more willing:

• to use features that require more modern browsers
• to add features that require storing state (e.g., a visitor's preferences about how to view a table)
• to require JavaScript
• to release UI changes
• to release features that only work on smaller datasets
  • 100 tables, with 1M rows? Sure.
  • 100,000 tables, with 1B rows? No.

I think these are generally reasonable tradeoffs -- as a plugin that users opt-in to, we have the luxury of being more aggressive in our minimum requirements and release cadence.

If Datasette makes a breaking change, the plugin may stop working. In that case, you can uninstall the plugin while waiting for a fix.

OK, that's enough disclaimers.

Installation

Install this plugin in the same environment as Datasette.

datasette install datasette-ui-extras

Usage

TBD

Features

• facets are dramatically different
  • shown as a sidebar on the left
  • loaded via ajax to ensure fast pageloads
  • facet suggestions are not a thing any longer; facet by the column menu
• tables have a "sticky" header that remains visible as you scroll (similar to "Freeze Rows" in Google Sheets)
• pressing / focuses the search box on tables that have one
• JSON arrays of strings are displayed as a comma-separated list
• the row page defaults to a vertical view, not a tabular view

Development

To set up this plugin locally, first checkout the code. Then create a new virtual environment:

cd datasette-ui-extras
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Now install the dependencies and test dependencies:

pip install -e '.[test]'

To run the tests:

pytest