When using Select row selection will typically be performed by the actions of an end user, but it also possible to programmatically select items in a table
using the API methods presented by the library. rows().select() and rows().deselect() plus their singular counterparts along with similar columns and cells methods provide this ability.
As they are based on the DataTables item selector methods, any of the selector options can be used to select the item to act upon. For example,
table.rows( ':eq(0)' ).select() will select the first row shown on the page.
This example uses the Buttons extension to present two buttons for the table which use the API to add
select all and deselect all buttons. It is worth noting that Select provides selectAll and selectNone button types that have this ability built in, but this example is used to demonstrate the API rather than the
buttons.
| Name | Position | Office | Age | Start date | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Position | Office | Age | Start date | Salary |
| Airi Satou | Accountant | Tokyo | 33 | 2008/11/28 | $162,700 |
| Angelica Ramos | Chief Executive Officer (CEO) | London | 47 | 2009/10/09 | $1,200,000 |
| Ashton Cox | Junior Technical Author | San Francisco | 66 | 2009/01/12 | $86,000 |
| Bradley Greer | Software Engineer | London | 41 | 2012/10/13 | $132,000 |
| Brenden Wagner | Software Engineer | San Francisco | 28 | 2011/06/07 | $206,850 |
| Brielle Williamson | Integration Specialist | New York | 61 | 2012/12/02 | $372,000 |
| Bruno Nash | Software Engineer | London | 38 | 2011/05/03 | $163,500 |
| Caesar Vance | Pre-Sales Support | New York | 21 | 2011/12/12 | $106,450 |
| Cara Stevens | Sales Assistant | New York | 46 | 2011/12/06 | $145,600 |
| Cedric Kelly | Senior Javascript Developer | Edinburgh | 22 | 2012/03/29 | $433,060 |
The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:
$(document).ready(function() {
var table = $('#example').DataTable( {
dom: 'Bfrtip',
select: true,
buttons: [
{
text: 'Select all',
action: function () {
table.rows().select();
}
},
{
text: 'Select none',
action: function () {
table.rows().deselect();
}
}
]
} );
} );
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.