Grist plugin : add conditional formatting to data

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Hi !

We are trying to build a grist plugin/widget to validate data (validata-grist-plugin) , and we want to highlight errors in the table with conditional highlighting.

I wonder what is the best way to perform this.

Right now, given a colId :

  • get the table id (grist.selectedTable.getTableId())
  • get the column numerical id (i.e. the id from _grist_Tables_column internal table)
  • create an empty rule (AddEmptyRule user action) for the specific table and column
  • fetch the updated _grist_Tables_column data, look at the rules to identify the new gristHelper_ConditionalRule (thanks to the “rules” property)
  • update two times the _grist_Tables_column to add the formula to highlight the right cell (conditional highlighting column) and to add as a widget option the red fill color to highlight the errors (data column)

That’s a lot of steps, and it is error prone. In particular, creating the empty rule and retrieving the created rule happen to be asynchronous, and any other process adding a new rule in between will break the retrieval.

I wonder if I missed an easier / more robust way. Isn’t there a user action where I can already populate the rule with a formula ? Or is there a way I can reliably get the Id of the empty rule created by AddEmptyRule ?

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