How to make an Angular Material table responsive

Question

I have a simple table with numerous columns, and I would like the columns to shrink automatically when sizing the browser window. The table-responsive works with Bootstrap, but I am looking for something similar for Angular Material. I am trying to avoid having 2 table definitions, and do not really want to do this myself in CSS. Is there a standard way in Angular Material for this?

<table class="mdl-data-table mdl-js-data-table mdl-shadow--2dp" flex>
    <thead>
        <th class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">Date</th>
        <th class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">Time</th>
        <th class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">Park</th>
        <th class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">Home Team</th>
        <th class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">Away Team</th>
        <th class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">Win/Loss</th>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr ng-repeat="game in games">
            <td class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">{{game.GameDate | SLS_Date}}</td>
            <td class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">{{game.GameTime | SLS_Time:'HH:mm' }}</td>
            <td class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">{{game.VenueName}}</td>
            <td class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">{{game.HomeTeamName}}</td>
            <td class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">{{game.AwayTeamName}}</td>
            <td class="mdl-data-table__cell--non-numeric">{{game.WinLoss}}</td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

Note, I have used the Material Design Lite table here, as Angular Material does not have a table today. Same problem, including the use of flex and grids.

I guess the new Material world does not like tables, so best option is to change the layout to not use tables.

Those who are interested in a solution for Angular 2+ can add a thumbs up to https://github.com/angular/material2/issues/8494 because when more people show interest, the team will have more reason to prioritize this feature. — Marcus, Dec 01 '17 at 17:45

score 14 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 25 '20 at 12:58

I created a little directive which can be applied to a mat-table table to make it responsive. This way it is easy to only add responsive behavior to some tables in the application (which was a requirement in my case). So basically the directive duplicates the content of each header cell (column name) as a data attribute so it can be accessed via the CSS content property (inspired by this article). Unfortunately CSS styles can't be applied to a directive, so the styles need to be imported globally.

Features:

no extra hard coded column names for mobile view
reacts on language changes and updates the column names for mobile view
reacts also on row changes/updates (e.g. add a row)
in mobile view it only shows the columns which were made sortable via the matSort directive

Here is a little stackblitz demo:

https://stackblitz.com/edit/material-table-responsive

This should not be seen as a general solution, as it does of course not cover all use cases. Also the styling of the table mobile view is bound to my specific requirements and probably needs to be adjusted. But i just wanted to share it, so that it maybe could serve and help as a starting point for others.

wow. Just awesome. Thanks for the wonderful solution. You just save the world. I really mean it. — Santosh, Jan 18 '21 at 09:23
Yes, he really saved. Thanks very much, @knoefel Maybe deploy the directive as an angular package so that anyone can use it without creating the directive in their code — Obumuneme Nwabude, Jan 25 '21 at 14:09

realappie · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-07T15:51:57.230

4

There is currently no way you can achieve this in MDL, Check out this issue on github.

I am having the same problem with my tables, but I guess I will have to make them responsive my self. There are a lot of tutorials out there & you should do a bit of research which table design would suit your responsive website the best.

Also, I think its worth checking out materializecss's responsive tables

edited Oct 07 '15 at 15:51

answered Oct 04 '15 at 21:07

realappie

3,453
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Unfortunately, I have come to the same conclusion and moved to the Angular Grid instead. I also did some redesign to not need the tables the same way. The Materialize CSS is a nice thought to get somethings to work. – Steven Scott Oct 05 '15 at 15:38
1

I love Materialize as the defacto css framework for Material specification, but unfortunately, they never changed their grid and layout to use flexbox instead of floats. Not to mention that the project is dead; no commits in years, I believe – OzzyTheGiant Jan 26 '21 at 02:09

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 08 '21 at 20:00

0

An easy solution is to wrap your table with a <div> with following styles:

width: 100%;
overflow-x: auto;

answered Feb 08 '21 at 20:00

kozenka

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How to make an Angular Material table responsive

3 Answers3