Responsive will automatically hide columns from the right-hand-side of the table, moving in as the table gets smaller, but it can often be useful to use a custom ordering, giving priority to certain columns (for example an actions buttons column, or a column with important information).
Column visibility priority can be defined in Responsive using the columns.responsivePriority initialisation option in the DataTables column options (columns or columnDefs). The priority given is a number
with lower values representing a higher priority.
This example shows the first name column being given top priority and then the extn. column. Resizing the table will cause the other columns to be removed before these two columns - with the first name column finally taking priority.
The column priority can also be defined by a data-priority attribute on the column's header cell (for example <th data-priority="1">First name</th>).
The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:
$(document).ready(function() {
$('#example').DataTable( {
responsive: true,
columnDefs: [
{ responsivePriority: 1, targets: 0 },
{ responsivePriority: 2, targets: -2 }
]
} );
} );
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:
div.container { max-width: 1200px }
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.