Plugin Development

@toolbox-web/grid is plugin-driven by design. The core is intentionally minimal (rendering, virtualization, scheduling); selection, editing, filtering, grouping, drag-and-drop, validation, accessibility shortcuts — almost every grid capability is a plugin under libs/grid/src/lib/plugins/. The same APIs are available to you for building your own.

This section covers the plugin system from three angles:

Architecture How the plugin system works internally — lifecycle, hooks, render integration, the feature registry, and tree-shaking.

Authoring Guide Step-by-step guide to building your first plugin: BaseGridPlugin, manifest, communication, queries, testing, distribution.

API Reference Typed reference for BaseGridPlugin, GridPlugin, PluginManifest, hooks, and the feature registry.

When to write a plugin

Reach for a plugin when you need to:

• React to grid lifecycle events (render, attach, detach, scroll, cell click, keyboard).
• Add new column-level or grid-level configuration that the grid validates and merges.
• Communicate with other plugins (e.g. an “audit log” plugin that listens for edits from EditingPlugin).
• Ship a reusable behaviour as its own package — third-party plugins are first-class.

For one-off styling or event handlers, plain CSS and grid.addEventListener(...) are usually enough — no plugin needed.