Column Visibility (Alpine) Guide

Examples

Want to skip to the implementation? Check out these Alpine examples:

Column Visibility

Read your reactive inputs such as data through a getter (for example backing them with Alpine.reactive) when creating the table, so the table sees updates.

Column Visibility Setup

Here's how you set up your table to use column visibility features. Adding the column visibility feature enables the related APIs.

import {
  columnVisibilityFeature,
  createTable,
  tableFeatures,
} from '@tanstack/alpine-table'

const features = tableFeatures({ columnVisibilityFeature })

const table = createTable({
  features,
  columns,
  get data() {
    return local.data
  },
})

The column visibility feature allows table columns to be hidden or shown dynamically. In v9, add columnVisibilityFeature to your features to enable this. There is a dedicated columnVisibility state and APIs for managing column visibility dynamically.

Column Visibility State

The columnVisibility state is a map of column IDs to boolean values. A column will be hidden if its ID is present in the map and the value is false. If the column ID is not present in the map, or the value is true, the column will be shown.

If you need to own the columnVisibility state yourself (for example, to persist user preferences), the recommended v9 approach is an external atom passed to the table's atoms option. External atoms give you fine-grained subscriptions anywhere in your app, and other code can read or write the visibility state without going through the component that owns the table. @tanstack/store is already a dependency of @tanstack/alpine-table, so createAtom is available.

import { createAtom } from '@tanstack/store'
import {
  columnVisibilityFeature,
  createTable,
  tableFeatures,
} from '@tanstack/alpine-table'
import type { ColumnVisibilityState } from '@tanstack/alpine-table'

const features = tableFeatures({ columnVisibilityFeature })

const columnVisibilityAtom = createAtom<ColumnVisibilityState>({
  columnId1: true,
  columnId2: false, // hide this column by default
  columnId3: true,
})

// subscribe to the atom wherever you need the value
columnVisibilityAtom.subscribe(() => {
  // react to visibility changes
})

const table = createTable({
  features,
  //...
  atoms: {
    columnVisibility: columnVisibilityAtom,
  },
})

Alternatively, the v8-style state.columnVisibility plus onColumnVisibilityChange pattern is still supported by owning the slice in Alpine.reactive. It can be convenient for simple integrations or when migrating v8 code, but it is less fine-grained than external atoms. See the Table State Guide for a deeper comparison.

const local = Alpine.reactive({
  columnVisibility: {
    columnId1: true,
    columnId2: false, // hide this column by default
    columnId3: true,
  } as ColumnVisibilityState,
})

const table = createTable({
  features,
  //...
  state: {
    get columnVisibility() {
      return local.columnVisibility // connect the reactive slice back down to the table
    },
    //...
  },
  onColumnVisibilityChange: (updater) => {
    local.columnVisibility =
      typeof updater === 'function' ? updater(local.columnVisibility) : updater
  },
})

Alternatively, if you don't need to manage the column visibility state outside of the table, you can still set the initial default column visibility state using the initialState option.

Note: If columnVisibility is provided to both initialState and a controlled option (atoms or state), the controlled value will take precedence and initialState will be ignored. Only provide columnVisibility in one place.

const features = tableFeatures({ columnVisibilityFeature })

const table = createTable({
  features,
  //...
  initialState: {
    columnVisibility: {
      columnId1: true,
      columnId2: false, // hide this column by default
      columnId3: true,
    },
    //...
  },
})

Disable Hiding Columns

By default, all columns can be hidden or shown. If you want to prevent certain columns from being hidden, you set the enableHiding column option to false for those columns.

const columns = [
  {
    header: 'ID',
    accessorKey: 'id',
    enableHiding: false, // disable hiding for this column
  },
  {
    header: 'Name',
    accessorKey: 'name', // can be hidden
  },
]

Column Visibility Toggle APIs

There are several column API methods that are useful for rendering column visibility toggles in the UI.

column.getCanHide - Useful for disabling the visibility toggle for a column that has enableHiding set to false.
column.getIsVisible - Useful for setting the initial state of the visibility toggle.
column.toggleVisibility - Useful for toggling the visibility of a column.
column.getToggleVisibilityHandler - Shortcut for hooking up the column.toggleVisibility method to a UI event handler.

Render a checkbox per column on real elements (not inside x-html). Bind :checked to column.getIsVisible(), :disabled to !column.getCanHide(), and call the handler returned by getToggleVisibilityHandler from @change.

html

<template x-for="column in table.getAllLeafColumns()" :key="column.id">
  <label>
    <input
      type="checkbox"
      :checked="column.getIsVisible()"
      :disabled="!column.getCanHide()"
      @change="column.getToggleVisibilityHandler()($event)"
    />
    <span x-text="column.id"></span>
  </label>
</template>

A "Toggle All" checkbox can use the table-level helpers table.getIsAllColumnsVisible() and table.getToggleAllColumnsVisibilityHandler().

html

<label>
  <input
    type="checkbox"
    :checked="table.getIsAllColumnsVisible()"
    @change="table.getToggleAllColumnsVisibilityHandler()($event)"
  />
  Toggle All
</label>

Column Visibility Aware Table APIs

When you render your header, body, and footer cells, there are a lot of API options available. You may see APIs like table.getAllLeafColumns and row.getAllCells, but if you use these APIs, they will not take column visibility into account. Instead, you need to use the "visible" variants of these APIs, such as table.getVisibleLeafColumns and row.getVisibleCells.

Render cell and header content with x-html="FlexRender(...)", and use the visible-aware row models when iterating with x-for:

html

<table>
  <thead>
    <template
      x-for="headerGroup in table.getHeaderGroups()"
      :key="headerGroup.id"
    >
      <tr>
        <!-- header groups already take column visibility into account -->
        <template x-for="header in headerGroup.headers" :key="header.id">
          <th :colspan="header.colSpan">
            <template x-if="!header.isPlaceholder">
              <span x-html="FlexRender({ header })"></span>
            </template>
          </th>
        </template>
      </tr>
    </template>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <template x-for="row in table.getRowModel().rows" :key="row.id">
      <tr>
        <!-- takes column visibility into account -->
        <template x-for="cell in row.getVisibleCells()" :key="cell.id">
          <td x-html="FlexRender({ cell })"></td>
        </template>
      </tr>
    </template>
  </tbody>
</table>