So we recently decided to include ‘Searchable tables’ within Invotra. For those of you, like myself, who have no initial idea as to what that is or could be, it’s essentially the ability to search all columns and rows within a table and for the table to update itself on the fly and only show the data that matches the search. Useful right?
I thought here we go, we’re going to have to write a whole load of custom code and it’s going to be a nightmare! We hate writing code if there’s open source code already out there that does it for us, so we went looking…
My nightmare was short lived as Fintan came across Datatables.
DataTables is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library. It is a highly flexible tool, based upon the foundations of progressive enhancement, and will add advanced interaction controls to any HTML table.
From the examples on their website you can see that it does exactly what we needed. And guess what, they have some neat plugins and an extensive API which made our job a whole lot easier. We managed to implement it as a WYSIWYG plugin, making it quick and easy to create a ‘Searchable table’.
