Datatables

DataTables is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library. It is a highly flexible tool, build upon the foundations of progressive enhancement, that adds all of these advanced features to any HTML table.

Zero configuration

DataTables has most features enabled by default, so all you need to do to use it with your own ables is to call the construction function: $().DataTable();.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Feature enable / disable

Disabling features that you don't wish to use for a particular table is easily done by setting a variable in the initialisation object. The full list of available options is available in the DataTables reference.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Default ordering (sorting)

With DataTables you can alter the ordering characteristics of the table at initialisation time. Using the order initialisation parameter, you can set the table to display the data in exactly the order that you want.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Multi-column ordering

DataTables allows ordering by multiple columns at the same time, which can be activated in a number of different ways

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Hidden columns

DataTables allows ordering by multiple columns at the same time, which can be activated in a number of

There are times when you might find it useful to display only a sub-set of the information that was available in the original table. For example you might want to reduce the amount of data shown on screen to make it clearer for the user (consider also using the Responsive extension for this). This is done through the columns.visible column option.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Complex headers (rowspan and colspan)

When using tables to display data, you will often wish to display column information in groups. DataTables fully supports colspan and rowspan in the table's header, assigning the required order listeners to the TH element suitable for that column.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

DOM positioning

When customising DataTables for your own usage, you might find that the default position of the feature elements (filter input etc) is not quite to your liking. To address this issue DataTables takes inspiration from the CSS 3 Advanced Layout Module and provides the dom initialisation parameter which can be set to indicate where you wish particular features to appear in the DOM. You can also specify div wrapping containers (with an id and / or class) to provide complete layout flexibility.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Alternative pagination

The default page control presented by DataTables (forward and backward buttons with up to 7 page numbers in-between) is fine for most situations, but there are cases where you may wish to customise the options presented to the end user. This is done through DataTables' extensible pagination mechanism, the pagingType option.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Scroll - vertical

This example shows the DataTables table body scrolling in the vertical direction. This can generally be seen as an alternative method to pagination for displaying a large table in a fairly small vertical area, and as such pagination has been disabled here (note that this is not mandatory, it will work just fine with pagination enabled as well!).

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Scroll - vertical, dynamic height

This example shows a vertically scrolling DataTable that makes use of the CSS3 vh unit in order to dynamically resize the viewport based on the browser window height. The vh unit is effectively a percentage of the browser window height. So the 50vh used in this example is 50% of the window height. The viewport size will update dynamically as the window is resized.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Scroll - horizontal

DataTables has the ability to show tables with horizontal scrolling, which is very useful for when you have a wide table, but want to constrain it to a limited horizontal display area. To enable x-scrolling simply set the scrollX parameter to be whatever you want the container wrapper's width to be (this should be 100% in almost all cases with the width being constrained by the container element).

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Scroll - horizontal and vertical

In this example you can see DataTables doing both horizontal and vertical scrolling at the same time. Note also that pagination is enabled in this example, and the scrolling accounts for this.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Language - Comma decimal place

A dot (.) is used to mark the decimal place in Javascript, however, many parts of the world use a comma (,) and other characters such as the Unicode decimal separator () or a dash (-) are often used to show the decimal place in a displayed number.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary

Language options

Changing the language information displayed by DataTables is as simple as passing in a language object to the DataTable constructor. This example shows a different set of English string being used, rather than the defaults.

Name Position Office Age Start date Salary
Tiger Nixon System Architect Edinburgh 61 2011/04/25 $320,800
Garrett Winters Accountant Tokyo 63 2011/07/25 $170,750
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433060
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Herrod Chandler Sales Assistant San Francisco 59 2012/08/06 $137,500
Rhona Davidson Integration Specialist Tokyo 55 2010/10/14 $327,900
Colleen Hurst Javascript Developer San Francisco 39 2009/09/15 $205,500
Sonya Frost Software Engineer Edinburgh 23 2008/12/13 $103,600
Jena Gaines Office Manager London 30 2008/12/19 $90,560
Quinn Flynn Support Lead Edinburgh 22 2013/03/03 $342,000
Name Position Office Age Start date Salary