Buttons has only a single built in button type: collection. This button provides the ability to show a list of buttons when activated. The buttons it will display in the sub-list
are defined by its buttons property which can take all of the same button options as the buttons.buttons array (which the
exception of another collection - collections cannot be nested).
Button collections can be useful for grouping functionality of button types - for example one collection could provide file export options, another table editing and a third column visibility controls.
This simple example shows a collection with two custom buttons. These buttons simply toggle the visibility of the final two columns in the table (if you require
full column visibility control, check out the colvis
button type).
| 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() {
$('#example').DataTable( {
dom: 'Bfrtip',
buttons: [
{
extend: 'collection',
text: 'Table control',
buttons: [
{
text: 'Toggle start date',
action: function ( e, dt, node, config ) {
dt.column( -2 ).visible( ! dt.column( -2 ).visible() );
}
},
{
text: 'Toggle salary',
action: function ( e, dt, node, config ) {
dt.column( -1 ).visible( ! dt.column( -1 ).visible() );
}
}
]
}
]
} );
} );
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.