Select example Select items

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.

NamePositionOfficeAgeStart dateSalary
NamePositionOfficeAgeStart dateSalary
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
Showing 1 to 10 of 57 entries

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.