Select has the ability to select rows, columns and / or cells in a table. Row selection is the default behaviour as it is the most commonly used selection item
type, but the items to be selected can be easily changed using the select.items initialisation option, or after initialisation using the select.items() API method.
This example shows cell selection using the select.items option. Note that the os selection style to select multiple items
will work equally well with cell selection as it does with row selection. Use shift click to select a range of cells and ctrl/cmd click to toggle the selection of
individual cells.
| 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( {
select: {
style: 'os',
items: 'cell'
}
} );
} );
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.