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Re: Guidelines for nested data tables?

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From: Sailesh Panchang
Date: Oct 23, 2009 10:00AM

Well a few questions:
Do the child data rows produced on expanding a parent row share the
same column headings as the parent row?
Is there a mechanism (markup) by which you are conveying the relation
between parent row and child row?
Often in such a case, the parent table appears to be used partly as a
data table and partly as a layout table. This happens if parent data
rows and child data rows have need for different column headers. Are
there some data rows to which certain column headers do not apply?
The need for a blank TR is also perhaps an indication of this.
If the design becomes complex, one may need to use header-id method of
relating data cells with header cells. That is error prone and not a
task one would like to do.
Sailesh Panchang
On 10/21/09, D A < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> I'm working on an interface that will consist of a data table with
> each row being expandable to show more details of that particular
> record. The details would then be formatted in their own table.
>
> This seems like a common need, but I haven't found too much that
> addresses it specifically.
>
> Is it fine to add a blank TR to the parent Table to insert the nested
> table within? Are there any issues/guidelines in regards to nesting
> data tables?
>
> -Darrel
>