Virtualization Feature Guide
Virtualization is useful when you have a lot of data you want to display client-side all at once, without having to use pagination. Mantine React Table makes this as simple as possible, thanks to @tanstack/react-virtual
with both row virtualization and column virtualization support.
NOTE: You should only enable row virtualization if you have a large number of rows. Depending on the size of the table, if you are rendering less than a couple dozen rows at a time, you will actually just be adding extra overhead to the table renders. Virtualization only becomes necessary when you have over 50 rows or so at the same time with no pagination.
Relevant Table Options
# | Prop Name | Type | Default Value | More Info Links | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | MutableRefObject<Virtualizer | null> |
| |||
2 | Partial<VirtualizerOptions<HTMLDivElement, HTMLTableCellElement>> |
| |||
3 | boolean |
| MRT Virtualization Docs | ||
4 | boolean |
| MRT Virtualization Docs | ||
5 | MutableRefObject<Virtualizer | null> |
| |||
6 | Partial<VirtualizerOptions<HTMLDivElement, HTMLTableRowElement>> |
| |||
What is Virtualization?
Virtualization, or virtual scrolling, works by only rendering the rows or columns that are visible on the screen. This is useful for performance and user experience, as we can make it appear that there are hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of rows in the table all at once, but in reality, the table will only render the couple dozen rows that are visible on the screen, or the handful of columns that are visible on the screen.
For more reading on the concept of virtualization, we recommend this blog post by LogRocket.
Does Your Table Even Need Virtualization?
If your table is paginated or you are not going to render more than 50 rows at once, you probably do not need row virtualization.
If your table does not have over 12 columns, you probably do not need column virtualization.
There is a tiny bit of extra overhead that gets added to your table's rendering when virtualization is enabled, so do not just enable it for every table. That being said, if your table does have well over 100 rows that it is trying to render all at once without pagination, performance will be night and day once it is enabled.
Enable Row Virtualization
Enabling row virtualization is as simple as setting the enableRowVirtualization
table option to true
. However, you will probably also want to turn off pagination, which you can do by setting enablePagination
to false
.
Take a look at the example below with 10,000 rows!
# | First Name | Middle Name | Last Name | Email Address | Address | Zip Code | City | State | Country |
---|
Enable Column Virtualization
Enabling column virtualization is also as simple as setting the enableColumnVirtualization
table option to true
.
Take a look at the example below with 500 columns!
WARNING: Do NOT enable row or column virtualization conditionally. It may break React's Rule of Hooks, and/or cause other UI jumpiness.
Virtualization Side Effects
When either Row or Column Virtualization is enabled, a few other table options automatically get set internally.
layoutMode Table Option
The layoutMode
table option is automatically set to the 'grid'
value when either row or column virtualization is enabled, which means that all of the table markup will use CSS Grid and Flexbox instead of the traditional semantic styles that usually come with table tags. This is necessary to make the virtualization work properly with decent performance.
enableStickyHeader Table Option
The enableStickyHeader
table option is automatically set to true
when row virtualization is enabled. This keeps the table header sticky and visible while scrolling and adds a default max-height of 100vh to the table container.
Customize Virtualizer Props
You can adjust some of the virtualizer props that are used internally with the rowVirtualizerOptions
and columnVirtualizerOptions
table options. The most useful virtualizer props are the overscan
and estimateSize
options. You may want to adjust these values if you have unusual row heights or column widths that are causing the default scrolling to act weirdly.
See the official TanStack Virtualizer Options API Docs for more information.
Access Underlying Virtualizer Instances
In a similar way that you can access the underlying table instance, you can also access the underlying virtualizer instances. This can be useful for accessing methods like the scrollToIndex
method, which can be used to programmatically scroll to a specific row or column.
See the official TanStack Virtualizer Instance API Docs for more information.
Full Row and Column Virtualization Example
Try out the performance of the fully virtualized example with 10,000 rows and over a dozen columns! Filtering, Search, and Sorting also maintain usable performance.
View Extra Storybook Examples