As a new GWT user (thanks a ton for the awesome toolkit) I have a few issues with table columns:
1) To my surprise, FlexTable row and column spans effect the offsets of later cells in the row/column of the span. In other words the row and column numbers passed as arguments into all of the methods are relative and not absolute indices (being offset by any spans before them). In addition to being undocumented (at least in the Javadocs), I found this completely counter-intuitive. I recognize that this maps to how HTML tables are implemented with respect to <tr> and <td> tags, but I thought that the whole point of having an API that allowed row/column references was to provide a higher-level abstraction. As it is, it is completely impossible (as far as I can tell) to manipulate FlexTable cells using absolute coordinates. Any operation pre-supposes full knowledge of any spans that may be in effect (or come into effect). I guess this makes it easier from your perspective to dynamically shift cells when a span is in effect, but given the indices used for all operations, I would have found it much more intuitive for spans to simply hide cell content that had been set but collided with a span. Am I missing something here? Is there a way to achieve absolute referencing? At the very least, the current behavior should be clearly documented, but I still find it very suspect. I assume that currently you can use setText/Widget to put content in a cell, and then create a span, and then later go to update the original cell using the same indices, only to find that those indices now apply to a different cell. Weird. 2) I was sad to discover that HTMLTables have a removeCell call and a removeRow call, but no removeColumn call. This feels inconsistent. Isn't the abstraction's purpose to let you think about things at a higher level than the base <tr><td> tags? I would find a removeColumn call to be justified, even if it was documented as being expensive to execute on large tables (if that is the reason it is not included, for example). 3) In a similar vein, it is odd that HTMLTable allows you to getRowCount and getCellCount, but not getColumnCount. That would be awfully convenient to have as well. I'd love to hear what any of the developers have to say about all this. At the very least it should all be documented better, but I would like to hope that table columns might ultimately become more first class citizens, with their offsets being fixed. :-) Charles --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
