Select example Checkbox selection

A selected row is typically shown in a DataTable by using a highlight background colour - however, it can also be useful to use other styling options to convey the selected state of items in a table to the end user.

A common option is to use a checkbox which can be clicked on to toggle row selection, which can be particularly useful if you wish to restrict row selection activation to a particular column, so other actions can be performed on the other cells in the table (such as inline editing).

A column can be shown with a checkbox that reflects the row's selected status simply through use of the select-checkbox CSS class for that column (columns.className). Row selection can be restricted to that column using the select.selector option.

The checkbox is not an <input type="checkbox"> element, but rather a CSS that uses the :before and :after pseudo elements of the cell to draw a box and the tick. This can therefore be easily modified to suit the style of your site / app.

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The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:

$(document).ready(function() { $('#example').DataTable( { columnDefs: [ { orderable: false, className: 'select-checkbox', targets: 0 } ], select: { style: 'os', selector: 'td:first-child' }, order: [[ 1, 'asc' ]] } ); } );

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.