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On the DataTables blog you will find news, announcements and tutorials about DataTables and its suite of extensions.

Latest posts

20th Sep 2024

By Allan Jardine -

Address auto-complete with Editor

When building data input forms with Editor, there are various ways in which a developer can make the end user's life a lot easier - clean, concise, and clear forms are one of Editor's strengths, but you can also make data entry easier for the end user using lookups and auto-completion. There is a good chance that you'll have come across an address auto complete when signing up for services or shipping items on the internet - this article will do a deep dive on how we can do that in Editor.

To start, let's skip straight to a working example so you can see what we are going to build - below is a table with three made up addresses. It is fully editable per a regular DataTable with Editor (local editing in this case - no backend database for this example). The part that is of interest in this blog post is if you create a new record or edit an existing one - the second field isn't a data field, rather it is an input that lets the user start to type an address, which will then be looked up using the excellent Geoapify API. A list of options are presented to the end user (you in this case!), refined as they continue to type, and lets them click on one to auto-complete the fields in the form.

Name	House	Street	City	State	Postcode	Country
Airi Satou	The Ivies	Glebe Close	London	London	NW11 9TU	United Kingdom
Hope Fuentes	392	Maple Street	Los Angeles	California	90017	United States
Serge Baldwin	28	Chemin Du Lavarin Sud	Caen	Basse-Normandie	14000	France

21st Aug 2024

By Allan Jardine -

DataTables React component

This is long overdue - it turns out React isn't just some passing fad (who knew! </sarcasm>), so it is with a degree of relief mixed with the usual pleasure of announcing new software that with this post I am introducing a React component for DataTables.

The new DataTables component for React is basically a wrapper around the existing DataTables library, exposing it in a way that will be immediately familiar to those who are used to working with React, while still making all of DataTables features available.

This post will discuss how to install and use the new component to get the benefits and use of DataTables in your React application. There are also a number of examples (such as this simple use case) presented so you can try the component out live.

26th Jul 2024

By Allan Jardine -

Ordering sequence plugin

I recently had an interesting question from a developer who wanted to show their end users a visual representation of the ordering sequence applied to a DataTable when multi-column ordering. For example, if you have two columns in the ordering, it can be useful to know which one DataTables is using for the primary order, and which for the secondary.

DataTable's default styling does include shading for cells in an ordered column, but the difference between primary and secondary ordering is intentionally subtle. To make it stand out more, I came up with the idea of showing a number label next to the order indicator. In the example below the first and second columns are used for primary and secondary ordering respectively and you can see the number at the top of each column:

Name	Position	Office	Salary
Tiger Nixon	System Architect	Edinburgh	$320,800
Garrett Winters	Accountant	Tokyo	$170,750
Ashton Cox	Junior Technical Author	San Francisco	$86,000
Cedric Kelly	Senior Javascript Developer	Edinburgh	$433,060
Airi Satou	Accountant	Tokyo	$162,700
Brielle Williamson	Integration Specialist	New York	$372,000
Herrod Chandler	Sales Assistant	San Francisco	$137,500
Rhona Davidson	Integration Specialist	Tokyo	$327,900
Colleen Hurst	Javascript Developer	San Francisco	$205,500
Sonya Frost	Software Engineer	Edinburgh	$103,600
Jena Gaines	Office Manager	London	$90,560
Quinn Flynn	Support Lead	Edinburgh	$342,000
Charde Marshall	Regional Director	San Francisco	$470,600
Haley Kennedy	Senior Marketing Designer	London	$313,500
Tatyana Fitzpatrick	Regional Director	London	$385,750
Michael Silva	Marketing Designer	London	$198,500
Paul Byrd	Chief Financial Officer (CFO)	New York	$725,000
Gloria Little	Systems Administrator	New York	$237,500
Bradley Greer	Software Engineer	London	$132,000
Dai Rios	Personnel Lead	Edinburgh	$217,500
Jenette Caldwell	Development Lead	New York	$345,000
Yuri Berry	Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)	New York	$675,000
Caesar Vance	Pre-Sales Support	New York	$106,450
Doris Wilder	Sales Assistant	Sydney	$85,600
Angelica Ramos	Chief Executive Officer (CEO)	London	$1,200,000
Gavin Joyce	Developer	Edinburgh	$92,575
Jennifer Chang	Regional Director	Singapore	$357,650
Brenden Wagner	Software Engineer	San Francisco	$206,850
Fiona Green	Chief Operating Officer (COO)	San Francisco	$850,000
Shou Itou	Regional Marketing	Tokyo	$163,000
Michelle House	Integration Specialist	Sydney	$95,400
Suki Burks	Developer	London	$114,500
Prescott Bartlett	Technical Author	London	$145,000
Gavin Cortez	Team Leader	San Francisco	$235,500
Martena Mccray	Post-Sales support	Edinburgh	$324,050
Unity Butler	Marketing Designer	San Francisco	$85,675
Howard Hatfield	Office Manager	San Francisco	$164,500
Hope Fuentes	Secretary	San Francisco	$109,850
Vivian Harrell	Financial Controller	San Francisco	$452,500
Timothy Mooney	Office Manager	London	$136,200
Jackson Bradshaw	Director	New York	$645,750
Olivia Liang	Support Engineer	Singapore	$234,500
Bruno Nash	Software Engineer	London	$163,500
Sakura Yamamoto	Support Engineer	Tokyo	$139,575
Thor Walton	Developer	New York	$98,540
Finn Camacho	Support Engineer	San Francisco	$87,500
Serge Baldwin	Data Coordinator	Singapore	$138,575
Zenaida Frank	Software Engineer	New York	$125,250
Zorita Serrano	Software Engineer	San Francisco	$115,000
Jennifer Acosta	Junior Javascript Developer	Edinburgh	$75,650
Cara Stevens	Sales Assistant	New York	$145,600
Hermione Butler	Regional Director	London	$356,250
Lael Greer	Systems Administrator	London	$103,500
Jonas Alexander	Developer	San Francisco	$86,500
Shad Decker	Regional Director	Edinburgh	$183,000
Michael Bruce	Javascript Developer	Singapore	$183,000
Donna Snider	Customer Support	New York	$112,000

Use shift click on the column headers to trigger multi-column ordering on the table, and note the indicators change. When ordering is applied to a single column only, no additional indicator is shown.