It can often be useful to have more information available in your form than you show in your table. For example, the table could show a summary while the form,
with more screen real estate available to it, can show detailed information. This is readily done with DataTables and Editor through the fact that DataTables can
use objects as a data source, and the columns.data option is used to specify which object properties are required for each column. The data objects provide
all the information needed for both the form and table, but only a limited selection of the available properties are actually used in the table, while the form
makes full use of the whole object.
This example (which is of course grossly simplified) shows four fields only in the table, while the form provides editing abilities for eight different fields.
| Name | Position | Office | Salary |
|---|
The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:
var editor = new DataTable.Editor({
ajax: '../../controllers/staff.php',
fields: [
{
label: 'First name:',
name: 'first_name'
},
{
label: 'Last name:',
name: 'last_name'
},
{
label: 'Position:',
name: 'position'
},
{
label: 'Office:',
name: 'office'
},
{
label: 'Extension:',
name: 'extn'
},
{
label: 'Start date:',
name: 'start_date',
type: 'datetime'
},
{
label: 'Salary:',
name: 'salary'
},
{
label: 'Age:',
name: 'age'
}
],
table: '#example'
});
$('#example').DataTable({
ajax: '../../controllers/staff.php',
columns: [
{
data: null,
render: function (data, type, row) {
// Combine the first and last names into a single table field
return data.first_name + ' ' + data.last_name;
}
},
{ data: 'position' },
{ data: 'office' },
{ data: 'salary', render: DataTable.render.number(null, null, 0, '$') }
],
layout: {
topStart: {
buttons: [
{ extend: 'create', editor: editor },
{ extend: 'edit', editor: editor },
{ extend: 'remove', editor: editor }
]
}
},
select: true
});
const editor = new DataTable.Editor({
ajax: '../../controllers/staff.php',
fields: [
{
label: 'First name:',
name: 'first_name'
},
{
label: 'Last name:',
name: 'last_name'
},
{
label: 'Position:',
name: 'position'
},
{
label: 'Office:',
name: 'office'
},
{
label: 'Extension:',
name: 'extn'
},
{
label: 'Start date:',
name: 'start_date',
type: 'datetime'
},
{
label: 'Salary:',
name: 'salary'
},
{
label: 'Age:',
name: 'age'
}
],
table: '#example'
});
new DataTable('#example', {
ajax: '../../controllers/staff.php',
columns: [
{
data: null,
render: (data) => data.first_name + ' ' + data.last_name
},
{ data: 'position' },
{ data: 'office' },
{ data: 'salary', render: DataTable.render.number(null, null, 0, '$') }
],
layout: {
topStart: {
buttons: [
{ extend: 'create', editor: editor },
{ extend: 'edit', editor: editor },
{ extend: 'remove', editor: editor }
]
}
},
select: true
});
In addition to the above code, the following Javascript library files are loaded for use in this example:
The HTML shown below is the raw HTML table element, before it has been enhanced by DataTables:
This example uses a little bit of additional CSS beyond what is loaded from the library files (below), in order to correctly display the table. The additional CSS used is shown below:
The following CSS library files are loaded for use in this example to provide the styling of the table:
This table loads data by Ajax. The latest data that has been loaded is shown below. This data will update automatically as any additional data is loaded.
The script used to perform the server-side processing for this table is shown below. Please note that this is just an example script using PHP. Server-side processing scripts can be written in any language, using the protocol described in the DataTables documentation.