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Generating Tables

MecSimCalc provides a flexible platform allowing the developer to generate tables in a variety of ways:

  1. The output editor allows for html tags and a developer familiar with html tables can use this functionality to design a table in the output step.
  2. A developer can choose to generate the table using a utility function in the code step that generates the required html string. For example, the following utility function build_html_table generates the required html table based on an input array of the table columns and an array of the column headers:
def build_html_table(columns, ColumnHeaders):
    # <table> is the table
    # <tr> is table row
    # <th> is table header
    # <td> is table data cell
    # (1) Table opening table
    html_table = "<table border='3' cellpadding='5' style='border-collapse:collapse;'><tr>"
    # (2) Add header row
    rows=len(columns[0])
    for h in ColumnHeaders:
        html_table += "<th>"+h+"</th>"
    html_table += "</tr>"
    # (3) Add all data rows
    for i in range(rows):
        html_table += "<tr>"
        for column in columns:
            html_table += "<td>"+str(column[i])+"</td>"
        html_table += "</tr>"
    # (4) Add the table closing tag
    html_table += "</table>"
    return html_table
caution

The above utility function works only for a table with multiple columns. It can easily be edited to generate a table with one column.

  1. A developer can use one of the many Python libraries that can output a html table directly. For example, the popular Pandas library, which is available on MecSimCalc has the built-in functionality of converting Pandas tables to html.

In the next example, we will show how an html table can be generated using both a utility function and the Pandas library.