Rudder

We have a lot of tables / grid in Rudder, to present Rules, nodes, compliances, reports, etc etc.

Today, these tables are produced in FULL html, and then enhanced with datatable to make them searchable etc.

That way of working is really heavy in size of data transfered (HTML is not a very dense data reprensentation) and mixed data presentation with the actual datas. Consequently, it's hard or more costly than expected to use refresh these tables, make them asynchrone, etc.

Moreover, browsers evolved a lot in the past 5 years, and today javascript is much more efficient to play with the dom that it used to be, and Rudder mandates the use of JS. So it would be more efficient to let the browser build the HTML for the table than enhancing an existing one.

What we want:

- a JSON representation of the data needed for each table, without loosing any information (tooltips, links, ...).
- a question remains about the formating: we used to use HTML to have rich text format. We need to know if this is still a good idea, and so if we 1/keep HTML for rich text, 2/ accept to not have rich text, 3/ find an other representation than HTML
- a Rudder grid "componenet" configurable for a given grid and able to use the JSON source

All grids have to be migrated to that new source handling, but the first one must be the rule grid.

No implementation restriction are set up front. If it's easier/cleaner to change datatable version (1.10 to use the new code/ajax/json oriented API http://next.datatables.net/reference/api/ ?) or use a third party integration (AngularJS ?), then we won't restrict us IF the result is alike what we have today.

We can even think of having in parallel the new and the old datatable component (for not-yet-migrated grids).