Ckeditor5: Support for nested tables

[Reinmar]

Add support for nesting one table inside another.

This feature wasn't on our roadmap yet, but let's gather a feedback if this is a common requirement.

NOTE: It is possible to enable support for nested tables. See https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5-table/issues/121#issuecomment-528251188 for how to do that.

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If you'd like this to be officially supported add 👍 to this ticket.

[Reinmar]

Quote from https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5/issues/1260#issuecomment-423948107

We do not "need" this feature for editing. But we have to handle incoming mails with our application. I found this nested table in a mail signature.

[AustinMutschler]

@Reinmar I have a specific use case that would require editing nested tables. This would be a must have feature for my team so if there is anyway to put it on the roadmap that would be very much appreciated.

Many of our current users are used to using Microsoft Word, so to properly convert some of these files to a web editing interface they would need to be able to nest tables inside of table like their current documents support.

[AustinMutschler]

@Reinmar is there any update on supporting a table in table feature?

[AustinMutschler]

@Reinmar I hate to keep bugging you about this but is there anyway for me to help implement this. Is there documentation I can read to try to help contribute to this project so I can attempt to add table in table support. This is a very important feature for my team to have for our specific use case.

[Reinmar]

Hi Austin!

The good news is that nested tables are actually supported, but this is disabled for simplicity via the schema. We had to reduce the scope initially, but from what I can see it's working quite fine.

To enable tables inside tables, you need to override the schema check which disables them. This check is a callback to Schema#checkChild event and you can add another callback to override that one:

editor.model.schema.on( 'checkChild', ( evt, args ) => {
    const context = args[ 0 ];
    const childDefinition = args[ 1 ];

    if ( context.endsWith( 'tableCell' ) && childDefinition && childDefinition.name == 'table' ) {
        // Prevent next listeners from being called.
        evt.stop();
        // Set the checkChild()'s return value.
        evt.return = true;
    }
}, { priority: 'highest' } );

You will need to wrap this code with function and pass it to config.extraPlugins because this code needs to be executed before the editor loads data.

The bad news is that there's not much interest in this so far, so if there will be some issues, we're not going to prioritize them at the moment. If you'd like help with resolving them you can always contact us.

[jodator]

@Reinmar, unfortunately, there are some minor issues with selecting the table inside the table with a mouse - it will select the uppermost table.

[AustinMutschler]

@Reinmar This helps a lot. Thank you for spending time to teach me how to enable this feature. I will be testing it extensively in a development and production environment and can hopefully help solve bugs and any issues that arise.

Update 1:
I am using CKEditor 5 with React and it appears that the onInit prop does not execute before the data is passed in because I can create a table within a table but when I refresh the page it converts it back to the weird text format.

Update 2:
I was able to overcome the issue in Update 1 by setting a flag that waited for my function in onInit to run before adding data to the data tag.

[aaroncalderon]

@Reinmar I looked into this and based off the sample Chat with mentions I was able to figure out what you ment by:

You will need to wrap this code with function and pass it to config.extraPlugins...

JavaScript Snippet below:

  ClassicEditor
    .create(document.querySelector('.editor'), {
      extraPlugins: [allowNestedTables], // this is the missing link
      toolbar: {
        items: [
          'heading',
          '|',
          'fontFamily',
          'fontBackgroundColor',
          'fontColor',
          'bold',
          //...
        ]
      },
      //...
    })
    .then(editor => {
      window.editor = editor;
    })
    .catch(error => {
      console.error('Oops, something gone wrong!');
      console.error(
        'Please, report the following error in the https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5 with the build id and the error stack trace:'
      );
      console.warn('Build id: kwgdr5ln3fje-waex6uolg10x');
      console.error(error);
    });

  // here we create the function
  function allowNestedTables ( editor ) {
    editor.model.schema.on('checkChild', (evt, args) => {
        const context = args[0];
        const childDefinition = args[1];

        if (context.endsWith('tableCell') && childDefinition && childDefinition.name == 'table') {
          // Prevent next listeners from being called.
          evt.stop();
          // Set the checkChild()'s return value.
          evt.return = true;
        }
      }, {
        priority: 'highest'
      });
  }

2020/07/14 - Updated code for brevity

[athuldom]

i have seen the above code snippet. I am using this editor in my react project. Can any one show me how to solve the issues with the above mentioned code in a react class component. As i am new to this, a help will be great full.
Thank you

[aaroncalderon]

@athuldom so, I googled for ckeditor react component and the first link I got was Rich text editor component for React. So, it has a __configuration__ property. All you have to do is add the configuration as shown above to include the extraPlugins and allowNestedTables bit.