What is difference between Creating Admin Grid with using Layout and Using Component

Question

As we are aware that we can create Admin Grid to display list of item from database table with two ways:

1.Using layout

2.Using component

I want to know which one is best and what is difference between both approaches? Please share your thoughts.

Answer 1

UI Components:

+ It's mostly configuration. So you write less code.
+ you get a cool grid with show/hide columns,drag/drop columns, full text search, inline edit, export built in and maybe others.
+ It can easily be extended with just another XML file in a different module.
+ any new feature Magento rolls out for the grids you will get it automatically in your grid.
- Difficult to debug.
- Difficult to modify.
- Difficult to build non standard grids.
- Not very much control over what happens.

Layout:

+ You got full control of what happens.
+ Relatively easy to build non-standard grids.
+ Easy to debug
+ You can use your knowledge from M1 to do it.
- Grid is not that flexible or extensible.
- you need to write the same code over and over again.
- More code to test or that can break

• Rian: One small note, the layout/block way is being deprecated in favor of the ui-component. See @deprecated 100.2.0 in favour of UI component implementation * @since 100.0.2 in the class. That might be a worthwhile negative for the layout version