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JavaScript Data GridFill Handle

Enterprise

When working with a Range Selection, a Fill Handle allows you to run operations on cells as you adjust the size of the range.

Enabling the Fill Handle

To enable the Fill Handle, simply set enableFillHandle to true in the gridOptions as shown below:

const gridOptions = {
    columnDefs: [
        { field: 'country' },
        { field: 'year' },
        { field: 'sport' },
        { field: 'total' }
    ],
    enableRangeSelection: true,
    enableFillHandle: true,

    // other grid options ...
}

It's important to note that if you enable both enableFillHandle and enableRangeHandle, the Fill Handle will take precedence.

Default Fill Handle

The default Fill Handle behaviour will be as close as possible to other spreadsheet applications. Note the following:

Single Cell

  • When a single cell is selected and the range is increased, the value of that cell will be copied to the cells added to the range.
  • When a single cell containing a number value is selected and the range is increased while pressing the ⌥ Esc/Option key, that value will be incremented (or decremented if dragging to the left or up) by the value of one until all new cells have been filled.

Multi Cell

  • When a range of numbers is selected and that range is extended, the Grid will detect the linear progression of the selected items and fill the extra cells with calculated values.
  • When a range of strings or a mix of strings and numbers are selected and that range is extended, the range items will be copied in order until all new cells have been properly filled.
  • When a range of numbers is selected and the range is increased while pressing the ⌥ Esc/Option key, the behaviour will be the same as when a range of strings or mixed values is selected.

Range Reduction

  • When reducing the size of the range, cells that are no longer part of the range will be cleared (set to null). If your column uses a valueParser, it will receive an empty string ('') as the new value.

Preventing Range Reduction

Reducing a range selection with the Fill Handle will clear cell contents by default, as can be observed in the Range Reduction example above.

If this behaviour for decreasing selection needs to be prevented, the flag suppressClearOnFillReduction should be set to true.

Fill Handle Axis

By the default, the Fill Handle can be dragged horizontally or vertically. If dragging only vertically, or only horizontally is a requirement, the gridOptions property fillHandleDirection property can be set. This default value is xy.

const gridOptions = {
    columnDefs: [
        { field: 'country' },
        { field: 'year' },
        { field: 'sport' },
        { field: 'total' }
    ],
    enableRangeSelection: true,
    enableFillHandle: true,
    fillHandleDirection: 'x',

    // other grid options ...
}

Fill Handle Events

When using the fill handle the grid will fire the fillStart event before it starts filling cells and the fillEnd event when all cells have been filled. See the Custom User Function example below for an example of using these events.

Custom User Function

Often there is a need to use a custom method to fill values instead of simply copying values or increasing number values using linear progression. In these scenarios, the fillOperation callback should be used.

const gridOptions = {
    columnDefs: [
        { field: 'country' },
        { field: 'year' },
        { field: 'sport' },
        { field: 'total' }
    ],
    enableRangeSelection: true,
    enableFillHandle: true,
    fillOperation: (fillOperationParams) => {
        return 'Foo';
    },

    // other grid options ...
}

FillOperationParams

Properties available on the FillOperationParams<TData = any, TContext = any> interface.

If a fillOperation callback is provided, the fill handle will always run it. If the current values are not relevant to the fillOperation function that was provided, false should be returned to allow the grid to process the values as it normally would.

The example below will use the custom fillOperation for the Day of the week column, but it will use the default operation for any other column.

Skipping Columns in the Fill Operation

The example below will use the custom fillOperation to prevent values in the Country column from being altered by the Fill Handle.

When the fillOperation function returns params.currentCellValue that value is not added to the params.values list. This allows users to skip any cells in the Fill Handle operation.

Non editable cells will not be changed by the Fill Handle, so there is no need to add custom logic to skip columns that aren't editable.

Read Only Edit

When the grid is in Read Only Edit mode the Fill Handle will not update the data inside the grid. Instead the grid fires cellEditRequest events allowing the application to process the update request.

The example below will show how to update cell value combining the Fill Handle with readOnlyEdit=true.

Suppressing the Fill Handle

The Fill Handle can be disabled on a per column basis by setting the column definition property suppressFillHandle to true .

In the example below, please note that the Fill Handle is disabled in the Country and Date columns.