NOTE: This tutorial is for RoR 2. If you’re using RoR 3, please see additional details here.

This tutorial will show you how to display tabular data in Ruby on Rails with dhtmlxGrid Standard Edition, which is available under GNU GPL. At the end, we will have a datagrid with in-line editing, sorting, and filtering, which loads its data from the server and saves it back to the database using Ruby on Rails.

To illustrate, we will create a table of users. This is a very common task for nearly any web application. Working with RoR, we could use scaffolds, but they don’t work so well for navigation on large sets of data. Besides, dhtmlxGrid has client-side editing and filtering functionality, which can greatly simplify things. This is how our final grid will look:

dhtmlxGrid and RoR Example: Editable Ajax Grid