The QTable Mental Model Unlock
After using Quasar’s QTable probably 50 times over the course of a year, I still found myself trying to structure it like a plain HTML table: wrapping q-tr in a v-for loop, expecting things to “just work.”
That mental model kept breaking—and the issue wasn’t QTable.
It was me never fully internalizing how Vue’s slot system works.
🧠 What I Kept Doing Wrong
I was approaching QTable like this:
<q-tr v-for="row in rows" :key="row.id">
<q-td>{{ row.someProp }}</q-td>
</q-tr>
This is how you’d approach a basic HTML table with Vue. But with QTable, that breaks—because the component is managing row rendering internally.
Slots aren’t a place to generate the whole structure—they’re a place to surgically inject behavior and markup into Quasar’s rendering process.
💡 What Finally Clicked
The QTable component isn’t a “render a table for me” helper. It’s an abstraction over data-rendering + slot hooks.
The correct approach looks more like:
<q-table :rows="rows" :columns="columns" row-key="id">
<template v-slot:body-cell-name="props">
<q-td :props="props">
{{ props.row.name }}
</q-td>
</template>
</q-table>
This blew my mind at first. Instead of trying to build a table from scratch, I now think of QTable as:
A controlled data renderer with injection points.
✍️ What I Did Next
The realization that I didnt really know slots hit hard enough that I immediately sat down and studied it, with the intent to publish (which is the most important part):
I needed to solidify the concept and encode the insight in my own terms. That article goes into:
- How slots differ from props and emits
- How slot naming + scope work
...and while I began with slots, I decided to expand it into just a full on template reference guide.
🌐 Why This Matters
This one shift didn’t just fix how I use QTable.
It made me revisit how I use:
- QSelect’s options
- QBtnDropdown’s menu slots
- Even custom components where I expose slot hooks
It also reinforced a bigger belief I’ve developed:
If you don’t write down and structure what you’re learning, you didn’t really learn it.
That guide is now part of a growing system of linked technical notes across my portfolio. Each article is a node in a graph that shows how my skills, insights, and tooling all connect.
As soon as I finish my link extractor and build a little UI, you will be able to see the graph representing all the links between all my articles and ideas.