change background color of single cell in data table

[nnako]

Hi,

I want to be able to change the background color of a single cell in a data table.

I already see this effect, when hovering over the cells: I see that below the mouse pointer, a "half-bright" color will show and, when pressing the mouse button, the cell stays highlighted.

The yellow cell marks the position where I clicked using the mouse. And the green cell marks my current mouse position.

There are some posts about changing the foreground color using rich-text strings (e.g. [red] ... [/red]). But this works good with string values, not floats. It makes handling value types quite complex. But anyway, I would like the background to change color, not the foreground.

Are there possibilities to style cell backgrounds programmatically?

[willmcgugan]

Why doesn't it work with string values?

[nnako]

Hi @willmcgugan ,

it works with string values, yes. But I organized the data table in the way that I use float objects within the cells. There are two "negative" effects right now:

• when changing the "foreground" color by using rich-text syntax, I automatically cast the cell values into strings. in order to sort the values in a numerically descending way would contain some conditions, string replacements and castings.
• using foreground color is not what I want. I'd rather use background color to mark certain cells (as seen in the example image of my former post). One reason for this is that I thought, the cell value itself would stay untouched: float.

Or is it generally advised to use strictly strings within textual's data frames? To avoid part of the confusion?

[willmcgugan]

I think you can use Text objects, but you will need to convert your floats to strings. Try adding cells like this: Text("3.14", style="on blue")

[TomJGooding]

This would only change the background of the text, rather than the background of the whole cell.

I'd also like to know how to change the cell background. Perhaps this is possible making use of component classes?

[nnako]

I see, it seems to be more complex than I thought. So, I will try to use text objects, convert the values back and forth to strings (as needed for evaluation) and see if filling the text background looks ok. component classes look quite complex to me, although interesting. Would have to dig into them with some more available time...

[nnako]

another issue with coloring a text cell's background would be to also color the foreground text accordingly, as otherwise the visibility of content could deteriorate.