It can often be useful to have more information available in your form than you show in your table. For example, the table could show a summary while the form,
with more screen real estate available to it, can show detailed information. This is readily done with DataTables and Editor through the fact that DataTables can
use objects as a data source, and the columns.data option is used to specify which object properties are required for each column. The data objects provide
all the information needed for both the form and table, but only a limited selection of the available properties are actually used in the table, while the form
makes full use of the whole object.
This example (which is of course grossly simplified) shows four fields only in the table, while the form provides editing abilities for eight different fields.
| Name | Position | Office | Salary |
|---|
The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 | var editor; // use a global for the submit and return data rendering in the examples$(document).ready(function() { editor = new $.fn.dataTable.Editor( { "ajax": "../../controllers/staff.php", "table": "#example", "fields": [ { "label": "First name:", "name": "first_name" }, { "label": "Last name:", "name": "last_name" }, { "label": "Position:", "name": "position" }, { "label": "Office:", "name": "office" }, { "label": "Extension:", "name": "extn" }, { "label": "Start date:", "name": "start_date" }, { "label": "Salary:", "name": "salary" }, { "label": "Age:", "name": "age" } ] } ); $('#example').DataTable( { dom: "Bfrtip", ajax: "../../controllers/staff.php", columns: [ { data: null, render: function ( data, type, row ) { // Combine the first and last names into a single table field return data.first_name+' '+data.last_name; } }, { data: "position" }, { data: "office" }, { data: "salary", render: $.fn.dataTable.render.number( ',', '.', 0, '$' ) } ], select: true, buttons: [ { extend: "create", editor: editor }, { extend: "edit", editor: editor }, { extend: "remove", editor: editor } ] } );} ); |
In addition to the above code, the following Javascript library files are loaded for use in this example:
Editor submits and retrieves information by Ajax requests. The two blocks below show the data that Editor submits and receives, to and from the server. This is updated live as you interact with Editor so you can see what is submitted.
The following shows the data that has been submitted to the server when a request is made to add, edit or delete data from the table.
// No data yet submittedThe following shows the data that has been returned by the server in response to the data submitted on the left and is then acted upon.
// No data yet received