What's the plan for Grid in Vaadin 8 (in terms of API changes)?

General
1

In Vaadin 7 I’m making quite extensive use of Table and various Container implementations, and am currently in the process of migrating away from Table to the current Vaadin 7 version of Grid.

It looks like the focus for Vaddin 8 is on redesigning the data binding functionality so I downloaded the latest alpha version (as available from https://vaadin.com/releases?version=prerelease/8.0/8.0.0/8.0.0.alpha5) and took a look at the new Grid class.

I assume that the current state of the class is unfinished - I see methods for specifying columns but nothing to set row data, and no support for editing etc. yet.

Do you have a plan for the eventual API of Grid? I noticed com.vaadin.server.data.DataSource and its implementations - it this designed to replace Container? (in respect to managing rows?). Would I be correct to assume the plan is to be able to bind a Grid to a DataSource and then add Column<T, V> instances to said Grid?

Is there an expected release date for Vaadin 8? Can we expect the new Grid implementation to be mostly feature complete (relative to the old Grid) at the time of release, or is it expected to be completed in future 8.x releases? In particular can we expect continued support for additional header and footer rows (for filtering, aggregating summary rows etc) and editing?

Thanks

2

Hi,

The focus in Vaadin 8 regarding data sources is indeed to remove Container/Item/Property and replace them with a much more lightweight and modern DataSource. This is used for the data shown in the grid. Your assumptions about types and columns sound correcty, you can see some current examples at
https://github.com/vaadin/framework8-demo

Grid in Vaadin Framework 8.0 should retain all the features from Framework 7.7 although part of the API will be tuned to better fit the new DataSource (there is not necessarily such thing as a “propertyId” for instance). Some features are still missing from the alphaX versions but they will be added before beta, see
https://github.com/vaadin/framework8-issues/milestone/4

3

Thanks Artur, that’s really helpful. Look forward to trying out the beta