Allow me to put the request in a simplified FMEA format as follows.

-- AntonioVega - 28 Feb 2004

You may want to look at SimpleTableEntryUsingForms. While the storage format of these tables is not compatible with the twiki tables (it stores tables in meta data), editing of cells is easier and can simply deal with large cells. I could not imagine working without this addon; see also my note in TWikiInALargeCorporateSetting.

-- ThomasWeigert - 29 Feb 2004

A note to the above. I have not found time yet, but I was planning to port the table editing from SimpleTableEntryUsingForms to the standard twiki tables. There are, however, pros and cons on having the table data in either format. For searching across tables in metadata format, see the addon at MetaTableSearch.

-- ThomasWeigert - 29 Feb 2004

Multi-line support for table rows already exists in TWiki, infact anything can span lines, just end the line with backslash "\".

entered as:

| short cell contents | very very very very very very very very very very \
very very very very very very very very \
very very very very very very very very very \
long cell contents | another cell |

another example of spanning lines

entered as:

another \
example of \
spanning lines

Still not great for editing, but okay for a not too long table. Would be great to see a full Javascript table editor plugin as standard in TWiki.

Does this cover the request, apart possibly from better documentation and may be adding to JavascriptBasedEditor?

-- JohnTalintyre - 01 Mar 2004

I would say that documenting this on formating rules will be OK. This alternative makes long cell content more readable and editable.I would say that deep down I ment to say, that a syntax was needed to makes a cell content behave like if it was a page. All the syntax rules to normal pages will apply to the cell content, for example tables whithin tables. Not sure, but seems like WalterMundt's RecursiveRenderPlugin can handle that. I´ll have to verify it.

-- AntonioVega - 02 Mar 2004

It should. After all, that was one of the main reasons I wrote it to begin with. You'd use code like this to do the above:

| short cell contents | <render>very very very very very very very very very very
very very very very very very very very
very very very very very very very very very
long cell contents</render> | another cell |

or alternatively

~bigcell
very very very very very very very very very very
very very very very very very very very
very very very very very very very very very
long cell contents
~~

| short cell contents | ~bigcell | another cell |

Oh, and with respect to tables within tables, see this TWiki page for an example of such a construct in action.

-- WalterMundt - 07 Mar 2004

May I also remind you of RicherSyntaxPlugin. This plugin offers the capability of splitting any line (not just table cells, but also lists, etc.) and continuing it with the next line without inserting a <BR /> or backslash at the end of the line. Instead, it adds the following two additional formatting rules:

• Every two lines in which the second one has greater indentation (more white space at beginning) and does begins with a letter (in order to avoid clashes with nested lists) are glued together.
• If a line has greater indentation than the previous one, but is composed only by blanks, it is replaced by <BR /><BR />. For ease of reading, it may contain some dots.

The only downside to this scheme is that there are a few tables in the TWiki documentation which are indented (for no obvious reason) and then above rule breaks the formatting there. (These could easily be fixed by eliminating the leading spaces from those tables.)

-- ThomasWeigert - 07 Mar 2004