When displaying a table which scrolls along the x-axis, it can sometimes be useful to the end user for the left most column to be fixed in place, if it shows grouping, index or similar information. This is basically the same idea as 'freeze columns' in Excel. This can be achieved with the FixedColumns plug-in for DataTables, as shown below.
Note that FixedColumns is suitable only for use with the scrolling features in DataTables. If you want to achieve a similar effect without scrolling enabled, please checkout FixedHeader, also for DataTables.
FixedColumns is initialised using the fixedColumns option as part of the DataTables construction as shown below. This example also has vertical scrolling
enabled (scrollY) and paging disabled
(paging).
The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:
$(document).ready(function() {
$('#example').DataTable( {
scrollY: 300,
scrollX: true,
scrollCollapse: true,
paging: false,
fixedColumns: true
} );
} );
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:
/* Ensure that the demo table scrolls */
th, td { white-space: nowrap; }
div.dataTables_wrapper {
width: 800px;
margin: 0 auto;
}
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.