Javascript Effectively Build Table From JSON and Add It to DOM

Question

I have a JSON array coming in from the server with an array of 200 objects each containing another 10 objects that I want to display in a table format. At first I was creati

Answer 1

This is definitely do-able. I don't think string concatenation is the way to go. In general it seems to be faster to create elements and manipulate them when they aren't attached to the main DOM; therefore create the entire table first then add it in. In plain javascript I think the code below is basically what you want to achieve..

    //mock up the data (this will come from you AJAX call)..
    var data = [];
    for(var i = 0; i < 200; i++){
        var rowData = [];
        for(var j = 0; j < 10; j++){
            rowData.push("This is a string value");
        }
        data.push(rowData);
    }

    //create table..
    var table = document.createElement("table");
    for(var i = 0; i < data.length; i++){
        var rowData = data[i];
        var row = document.createElement("tr");
        for(var j = 0; j < rowData.length; j++){
            var cell = document.createElement("td");
            cell.innerHTML = rowData[j];
            row.appendChild(cell);
        }
        table.appendChild(row);
    }
    //finally append the whole thing..
    document.body.appendChild(table);

When I stick this into the console in Safari, it runs in < 1 second so you should be ok.