Long Term Strategy

[spike-rabbit]

The ngx-datatable has been heavily used across many Siemens products for years. When we originally forked the table, we planned to stay close to the original version and eventually move back to it once our most important issues were fixed.
Since then, activity on the original version has dropped, and we have increasingly diverged over time.
Recognizing this shift, we decided last year to increase our investment in the table and transform it into a maintained, modern, and robust project.

We have identified five primary issues to address. The target versions for these improvements are approximate and subject to change.

Lack of types (target: v23)

Many areas of the codebase, including public APIs, currently use any types. This undermines TypeScript’s benefits for both internal development and external consumers. Strengthening typings is our most urgent priority.
We have already begun this work, which has enabled us to identify and fix numerous actual and potential bugs.
Improved type safety will allow us to define APIs more rigorously and provide stronger safeguards against unintended breaking changes.

Missing unit tests (target: v24)

Improving stability and reliability is essential since the datatable is widely used across Siemens products.
Comprehensive testing is the foundation for this.
While we have already introduced some end-to-end (e2e) tests, coverage with unit tests remains limited.
We are prioritizing a significant increase in unit tests to ensure correct functionality across all areas.
No additional major development will proceed until this is completed, reducing the risk of regressions.

Reactivity-related bugs (target: v24)

Once we have a solid foundation of tests, we will begin addressing current bugs and feature requests—starting with the table’s reactivity flaws:

• The order in which properties are set can affect the table’s behavior in certain situations, even though this should not be the case.
• Computed internal state is sometimes not updated as expected when inputs change.

We plan to resolve most of these issues by migrating the entire codebase to Angular signals.

Rendering / responsive-related bugs (target: v25)

While improvements in reactivity will resolve many rendering issues, some challenges remain, especially around responsiveness.
We will evaluate solutions such as CSS Grid and ResizeObserver to minimize manual layout recalculations and improve responsive behavior.

Accessibility (target: v25)

The datatable is not yet fully compliant with WCAG guidelines. To improve accessibility:

• We will implement support for role="table" and role="grid" attributes, making this behavior configurable.
• Further enhancements will ensure better support for keyboard navigation and screen readers.

[kfenner]

@spike-rabbit Awesome, thanks for the write up 🥇

If you want to go even further, there are some missing features and improvements we need:

• Spanning of columns
• Cell editing "spreadsheet style" (maybe already covered via accessibility "grid")