How to call ui.table methods with return values in NiceGUI 1.0

[falkoschindler]

Discussed in #229

^{Originally posted by johancj January 6, 2023}
Hi, how can I use methods in ui.table with a return value in nicegui version 1.0?

I would really appreciate an example like in #150, but with for example the function getSelectedRows. #150 is very similar to my case, but not applicable for nicegui v1.0

---

The undocumented possibility to receive return values from AG Grid API calls has been lost when leaving JustPy behind for version 1.0. It would, however, be a valuable feature and not too hard to implement, since we already support return values from ui.run_javascript.

• support return values for ui.run_method
• support return values for table.call_api_method
• demonstrate getSelectedRows on API reference

[falkoschindler]

I'm still hesitating to implement return values for run_method and call_api_method as initially planned. Both would have to become async and, like with run_javascript, we would need to introduce parameters respond, timeout and check_interval. That's possible, but a rather significant API change, especially switching from sync to async.

In contrast to the original plan, I found a rather simple alternative: Introducing getElement() in JavaScript in 23da696, we can now write something like:

result = await ui.run_javascript(f'getElement({table.id}).gridOptions.api.getSelectedRows()')

This keeps the API for NiceGUI's core features nice and simple while enabling power users - especially of 3rd party modules like AG Grid and Highcharts - to get full access of underlying APIs.

Here is a complete example for trying out different API methods with and without return value:

table = ui.table({
    'columnDefs': [{'field': 'name'}],
    'rowData': [{'name': 'Alice'}, {'name': 'Bob'}],
})

async def count():
    rows = await ui.run_javascript(f'getElement({table.id}).gridOptions.api.getSelectedRows()')
    ui.notify(f'{len(rows)} selected')

ui.button('Select', on_click=lambda: table.call_api_method('selectAll'))
ui.button('Deselect', on_click=lambda: table.call_api_method('deselectAll'))
ui.button('Count', on_click=count)

[maxim-trokhimtchouk]

Thanks guys. I ended up implementing an async version of run_method on our fork to solve this problem. However, this is a simple enough workaround and I much rather stick to the official fork.