DataTables

I'm using DataTables to display a list of alert messages in a monitoring application. I'm currently adding a new column which contains another table with detailed information, depending on the type of alert. While doing so, I found that there's a bug in nested tables support.

Everything works fine if the nested table is a simple table->tr->td structure, but if I markup the first line as <thead>, everything breaks. The Firebug console contains a warning message:

DataTables warning (table id = 'alertstable'): Unexpected number of TD elements. Expected 10400 and got 900. DataTables does not support rowspan / colspan in the table body, and there must be one cell for each row/column combination.

And then it fails at

nCell.parentNode.removeChild( nCell );

with "nCell is undefined".

I could narrow down the condition under which the bug appears to: only when there is a <thead> element in the nested table, and this <thead> element contains <td> elements.

My workaround therefore is to use <th> elements instead of <td> in the <thead>.

According to our version control log, the DataTables version in our development environment is 1.8.2. I'm using an up-to-date Firefox with Firebug.