Way to Manually Specify Column Type?

coreyo

I am using datatables to display results from a search form. The displayed columns as well as their contents are dynamically generated as HTML (dom) then initialized with jQuery as a datatable. The problem that I am running into is that many of the values for the columns are often NULL. In this case the value of the " " placeholder is used for proper css rendering.

I noticed that, when the first entry has an empty (or "&nbsp") value, it is assumed to be a string, regardless of whether or not all non-empty values are recognizable dates. Is there a way to manually specify in the HTML (or elsewhere) when a column is supposed to be seen as a date type?

Even better, any way to change a setting or easily alter the code to keep going through the entries in a table to look for a walk down the column to find a non-empty entry before assuming that the type is STRING?

Thanks in advance for any help.

allan

Hi coreyo,

Yes indeed you can specify the type by using the sType option: http://datatables.net/usage/columns#sType . One thing to remember though is that there is a reason the auto-detected types are detected the way they are :-). For example how do you treat " " numerically? ±infinity or 0 or something else? You can create your own sorting plug-ins (and activate them with sType or an auto-detection plug=in) like these: http://datatables.net/plug-ins/sorting

Allan

coreyo

From what I can see of the type detection/sorting plugins, they consist only of a regular expression matcher (for the type detection), and a comparator function (for the sorting). Unless there is more to it that I'm not seeing, it does not appear to give you a way to troll down the column values looking for a non-blank entry. Is this incorrect?

In my case, the date types are in a standard format and can be sorted with no problem, so long as they are properly detected as dates. Is there a way to specify column type in an HTML attribute in the header rather upon the datatable's initialization? If not, is there a way to make a call programmatically after the table has been initialized to set the sType attribute? Been looking for an example on how to set options programmatically after initialization.