Responsive table handling in Twitter Bootstrap

When a table's width exceed the span's width, like this page: http://jsfiddle.net/rcHdC/

You will see the table's content is outside of the span.

What would be the best method to cater this case?

Bootstrap 3 now has Responsive tables out of the box. Hooray! :)

You can check it here: https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/css/#tables-responsive

Add a <div class="table-responsive"> surrounding your table and you should be good to go:

<div class="table-responsive">
  <table class="table">
    ...
  </table>
</div>

To make it work on all layouts you can do this:

.table-responsive
{
    overflow-x: auto;
}

One option that is available is fooTable. Works great on a Responsive website and allows you to set multiple breakpoints... fooTable Link

There are many different things you can do when dealing with responsive tables.

I personally like this approach by Chris Coyier:

• http://css-tricks.com/responsive-data-tables/

You can find many other alternatives here:

• http://css-tricks.com/responsive-data-table-roundup/
• http://bradfrost.github.io/this-is-responsive/patterns.html#tables

If you can leverage Bootstrap and get something quickly, you can simply use the class names ".hidden-phone" and ".hidden-tablet" to hide some rows but this approach might to be the best in many cases. More info (see "Responsive utility classes"):

• http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/scaffolding.html#responsive

If you are using Bootstrap 3 and Less you could apply the responsive tables to all resolutions by updatingthe file:

tables.less

or overwriting this part:

@media (max-width: @screen-xs) {
  .table-responsive {
    width: 100%;
    margin-bottom: 15px;
    overflow-y: hidden;
    overflow-x: scroll;
    border: 1px solid @table-border-color;

    // Tighten up spacing and give a background color
    > .table {
      margin-bottom: 0;
      background-color: #fff;

      // Ensure the content doesn't wrap
      > thead,
      > tbody,
      > tfoot {
        > tr {
          > th,
          > td {
            white-space: nowrap;
          }
        }
      }
    }

    // Special overrides for the bordered tables
    > .table-bordered {
      border: 0;

      // Nuke the appropriate borders so that the parent can handle them
      > thead,
      > tbody,
      > tfoot {
        > tr {
          > th:first-child,
          > td:first-child {
            border-left: 0;
          }
          > th:last-child,
          > td:last-child {
            border-right: 0;
          }
        }
        > tr:last-child {
          > th,
          > td {
            border-bottom: 0;
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

With:

@media (max-width: @screen-lg) {
  .table-responsive {
    width: 100%;
...

Note how I changed the first line @screen-XX value.

I know making all tables responsive may not sound that good, but I found it extremely useful to have this enabled up to LG on large tables (lots of columns).

Hope it helps someone.