Data Loading

There are several simple ways of loading data into dhtmlxGrid:

adding data via a configuration property
load data from an external file
load data from a local data source

First, you need to prepare a data set that will be loaded into Grid.

Preparing data set

dhtmlxGrid expects loaded data in the JSON format. Here is an example of an appropriate data set:

var dataset = [
    {
        "id": 0,
        "a": 1,
        "b": "Linwood Long long long",
        "c": "Petersen",
        "d": "Dahlgreen Place"
    },
    {
        "id": 1,
        "a": 2,
        "b": "Edenburg",
        "c": "Agnes",
        "d": "Gem Street"
    },
    // more columns
];

Each object in the data set contains configuration of a grid row. The structure of a row is rather flexible. It may include:

rowId - (string|number) optional, the id of a row. In case you haven't specified ids of rows, they will be auto-generated
columnContent - (string|number) content of a column as key:value pairs, where key is the id of a column and value is any content you want to add into the column

Adding data on Grid initialization

You can specify data you want to add into Grid on the initialization stage. Make use of the data configuration property, as in:

var grid = new dhx.Grid("grid_container", {
    columns: [// columns config],
    data: dataset
});

External data loading

To load data from an external file, make use of the load method of Data Collection. It takes the URL of the file with data as a parameter:

var grid = new dhx.Grid("grid_container");
grid.data.load("../common/dataset.json");

The component will make an AJAX call and expect the remote URL to provide valid JSON data.

Data loading is asynchronous, so you need to wrap any after-loading code into a promise:

grid.data.load("/some/data").then(function(){
   // some logic here
});

Loading from local source

To load data from a local data source, use the parse method of Data Collection. Pass a predefined data set as a parameter of this method:

var grid = new dhx.Grid("grid_container");
grid.data.parse(dataset);

Saving and restoring state

To save the current state of a grid, use the serialize method of Data Collection. It converts the data of a grid into an array of JSON objects. Each JSON object contains the configuration of a separate row.

var state = grid1.data.serialize();

Then you can parse the data stored in the saved state array to a different grid. For example:

// creating a new grid
var grid2 = new dhx.Grid(document.body);
// parsing the state of grid1 into grid2
grid2.data.parse(state);