Pretty good, but responsive design needs more thought and options
Overall this is a nice plugin with some great features. However, I feel that it is lacking in the responsive behaviour. As this is a key area for me, unfortunately I intend to get a refund.
For example, you can only manually set which columns will be responsively hidden at tablet and mobile screen sizes. You can't control which will be responsively hidden at *desktop* sizes — you can only hide columns *completely* rather than responsively for desktop sizes. Nor can you set priorities so that it could adjust over a wide range of screen sizes, automatically, which would be a better solution anyway and one that I have seen elsewhere.
So, if you have lots of columns then your only real option is to dump the responsive feature and use horizontal scroll instead. This is disappointing, and also problematic as there don't seem to be options to fix any particular columns so that they don't scroll — a pretty basic need.
Nor are there controls for the user to dynamically show or hide columns according to their need.
I've looked at the documentation and the examples, and it is clear that many features I consider vital to achieve really user-friendly responsive tables are missing.
This *is* a good plugin, but it my view it is let down by an incomplete implementation of responsive behaviour. If the developers fix that weakness then this plugin would be great I think — while I haven't delved into the rest of it beyond what I specifically wanted to test as a priority, it does have many other features that seem to be well implemented.
Aleksandar_TMS
May 9, 2024Hello there!
Thank you for your review!
All your points are valid, but they can all be resolved with a few workarounds.
To use the responsive feature on desktops, you can go to wpDataTables settings, and increase the "Default tablet width" to (for example) 2000. When you do that, all screens with a width below 2.000px will be considered as tablet devices, so columns you've chosen to collapse on tablets will also collapse on desktops.
Fixing the first column and header can be achieved with some custom code, and if you can reach out to our support agents, on our official support platform, they'll gladly provide you with that code. I believe that there are already a few public tickets in this regard, so you can search for them when you visit our platform.
We are planning on including fixed columns and rows in the plugin, but unfortunately, we don't have an ETA on that, so until then, we can provide a workaround with custom code.
If you have any other questions or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to us!
Best regards!