Magento 2: Add Grid Column to Customer Admin Order without Adding Column to Database?

You can add a column to your admin grid by adding a file named view/adminhtml/ui_component/sales_order_grid.xml

with the following content to your custom module :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<listing xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:module:Magento_Ui:etc/ui_configuration.xsd">
    <listingToolbar name="listing_top"/>
    <columns name="sales_order_columns">
        <column name="order_reference" class="Vendor\Example\Ui\Component\Listing\Column\Example">
            <argument name="data" xsi:type="array">
                <item name="config" xsi:type="array">
                    <item name="dataType" xsi:type="string">text</item>
                    <item name="visible" xsi:type="boolean">true</item>
                    <item name="label" xsi:type="string" translate="true">Example Column</item>
                </item>
            </argument>
        </column>
    </columns>
</listing>

      

        
        
        
      

    

Your Example.php

file should expand Magento\Ui\Component\Listing\Columns\Column

and have a way prepareDataSource()

to fill in the data:

/**
 * @param array $dataSource
 * @return array
 */
public function prepareDataSource(array $dataSource)
{
    if (isset($dataSource['data']['items'])) {
        foreach ($dataSource['data']['items'] as & $item) {
            $item[$this->getData('name')] = 'Something'
        }
    }

    return $dataSource;
}

      

        
        
        
      

    

Note that if you want to add sorting and filtering options, you need to add some other settings, but this depends on what data you want to display in the column.