Enhancing Payload CMS List Views: Customizable Table Components for Greater Flexibility

[italodr]

First of all, congratulations on the excellent work with the CMS and, especially, on the new update to v3. 🫡

Regarding Collection Views, it would be valuable to have a template for the list view. This template should be similar to the existing one, but with the ability to extend it to reuse global functionalities.

According to the current documentation, when we need to modify the view, we have the option to modify the list view in its entirety.

• Documentation reference: https://payloadcms.com/docs/admin/views#collection-views
• Code reference: https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/blob/main/packages/next/src/views/List/index.tsx

This is great, but we lose all the built-in list functionalities, such as bulk editing, search, and other useful features.

It would be ideal to leverage these functionalities and modify only the table, thus allowing different types of custom visualizations to be added. In my specific case, I implemented a tree hierarchy list through a Plugin for selected collections. However, it stopped working after the changes in view rendering introduced in version beta.130.

An alternative would be to add more customization options, similar to how the edit view works. For example, something like:

export const MyCollectionConfig: SanitizedCollectionConfig = {
  // ...
  admin: {
    components: {
      views: {
        list: {
	  table: {
	    Component: '/path/to/MyCustomTableListView',
	  }
        }
      },
    },
  },
}

This way, the component can be passed to the List view as a parameter to render a custom table.

Looking forward to read your feedback!

[bratvanov]

Agreed, the list view/table component could use some enhancements to make it more flexible and adaptable! Your tree list plugin looks great, and the only thing that would make it even better is drag-and-drop functionality.

I recently flagged the need to expose some of the ListView table constants as props in this Discord discussion, and @JarrodMFlesch mentioned that the core team would be discussing it. Perhaps the points raised by @italodr can be factored in as well.