How to Custom Sort With React-Table Library

1. Create and Manage Tables With React Table
2. Custom Sort With react-table Library

Modern websites contain lots of visuals and sometimes can be overloaded with information. Visual aids like tables can help you manage information to keep it easily digestible for your customers.

Tables can be particularly useful for comparisons between products, services and other options.

Create and Manage Tables With React Table

Many libraries allow you to create and manage tables in React. They all have a different approach; some render UI, while others focus on data management alone.

react-table is the second type of utility. It provides hooks, which can be used to create and maintain tables with advanced features, such as sorting, filtering, and searching.

In general, these hooks can have other uses as well. Developers can use them to manage other types of grid elements for storing data.

React Table is a headless utility, which means that it doesn’t provide a visual table element. Instead, hooks from the React Table library can be used to work with data itself and arrange it into abstract columns and rows.

Thanks to this feature, React developers have the freedom to customize the appearance of their tables. React Table handles anything to do with data, and you can design the skeleton of the table.

Custom Sort With react-table Library

To implement the custom sorting feature in React, you will need to use the useSortBy hook from the react-table library.

The useSortBy hook accepts multiple arguments necessary to sort the table.

The sortType function allows you to compare and order two rows of data. The value can either be a string or a function.

The function takes the following arguments: sortType(rowA, rowB, columnId, desc). The first two arguments are rows that need to be compared.

If the first one is larger, the function will return 1; if not, -1. The columnId argument specifies the column for sorting rows. The final argument specifies the direction for sorting.

It can be desc (short for descending) or asc (ascending).