Bulk Editor allows editing an arbitrary amount of data as an atomic operation (from the server's perspective).
Bulk Editor allows editing an arbitrary amount of data as an atomic operation (from the server's perspective).
This is different from YUI DataTable Quick Edit, because Quick Edit only allows editing a single page of records and Quick Edit is restricted by what YUI DataTable can display: one table row per record, where each cell contains a single value.
Bulk Editor allows any kind of presentation of the form fields, and supports pagination without having to save to the server. The default implementation uses an HTML table.
Bulk Editor allows creating records, removing records, and modifying records, so it is useful both for creating new records and editing existing records. Bulk Editor also supports both client-side and server-side pagination.
Client-side pagination is the fastest and provides the most flexibility, because it allows best-effort saving: acceptable values can be saved, acceptable insertions and removals can be processed, and then validation errors can be displayed for invalid values.
Server-side pagination must be used when it is not feasible to transfer all the data to the client. In this case, you can only save all-or-nothing because the data returned by the server must be immutable during the edit process.
One example of server-side pagination is bulk upload of data. The file is uploaded to the server, parsed (accepting any errors), and stored in a scratch space. Then Bulk Editor is invoked to allow the user to verify the data and fix the errors.