Are there workarounds for working with Tasks in lightning-datatable LWC?

Question

I’ve been building a LWC that uses lightning-datatable to display records of the Task sObject. Since the Task object is not supported by the lightning UI API, my understanding (and tested) is that I can’t @wire my Apex method that queries the Tasks. This is a well established annoyance: https://ideas.salesforce.com/s/idea/a0B8W00000GdXHsUAN/support-task-and-event-objects-in-ui-api-with-lwc

And since I can’t use UI API and the wire service, I can’t use refreshApex()/getRecordNotifyChange() to update the lightning-datatable after an inline update operation.

The best I can come up with so far is to refresh the entire page using something like window.location.reload();. But that is not ideal.

I would settle for something that would cause the LWC alone to rerender (not the entire page), but I can't seem to find any code that would accomplish that.

In sum, how might we refresh Task data displayed in lightning-datatable after an inline edit operation?

Answer 1

I ended up creating a Platform Event (fired when a Task is created/updated) that the LWC can subscribe to. Then in response to that event, the LWC calls the Apex method again to get fresh records. I was still having trouble getting the datatable to update when the @track property corresponding to the data is updated by that second Apex invocation. However, reassigning the tracked property with the spread operator fixed that problem:

handleDataUpdatedEvent() {
    console.log("*******calling handleDataUpdatedEvent");  
    // Get the updated records
    getRecords({strObjectApiName: this.relatedObjectApiName,
                strFieldPaths: this.fieldString,
                strWhereClause: this.whereClause,
                recordId: this.recordId,
                strRelationshipFieldAPIName: this.relationshipFieldApiName})
    .then(data=>{
        console.log('********data from get Updated Records: ' + JSON.stringify(data));
        this.records = [...data];
        this.sortData(this.sortBy, this.sortDirection);
        console.log("********this.records: " + JSON.stringify(this.records));
    })
    .catch(error=>{
        this.error = error;
    });
}