Plug-in development
As flexible as DataTables is, there may be times when you wish to customise certain aspects to your specific needs. DataTables has a number of plug-in and extension options which are detailed in this section.
If you do take the time to create a plug-in for DataTables and wish to share it with others, please get in touch.
API plug-in development
The DataTable's API provides a large number of methods that can be used to manipulate the table and gather data from it. Many of the methods that you will need are built-in, but you might also find it useful to be able to create a plug-in API method to extend the built-in functionality. This page discusses how to create a plug-in API method for DataTables. Read more »
Feature plug-in development
DataTables' core abilities add a lot of flexibility to a plain HTML table, but there is a lot of room left for extensions to provide enhancements that might be specific to your use case or to add functionality that is not available in DataTables. For this, DataTables provides a number of APIs that can be used to create feature plug-ins. This page discusses the standard code patterns used to create them Read more »
Search plug-in development
The custom search options in DataTables provide the ability to extend the search abilities of any DataTable using virtually any logic you wish to apply to the data set. This is done by simply providing a search function that is called by DataTables for each row in the table whenever it needs to search the data. The search function then simply returns a value to indicate if the row in question should be included in the result set or not. Read more »
Ordering plug-in development
DataTables has built in support to correctly order the most common data types that are displayed in a table, but there will still be times when you find you have data that is not orders as you might expect. One option is to use orthogonal data so data that DataTables understands is used for ordering (for example a date might be given as an integer timestamp rather than a formatted string). Another option is to use an ordering plug-in, as discussed on this page. Read more »
Type detection plug-in development
Ordering plug-ins can be very useful for ordering arbitrary data types, however to be truly useful they need a companion type detection plug-in that will automatically scan a column's data and determine if the ordering plug-in can order the data in the column. Ordering plug-ins can be used without a type detection plug-in through the columns.type option, but their utility is greatly increased if this just happens for you automatically! Read more »