Thursday 30th November, 2017

Experiment: SearchPane

Normally when I release new software for DataTables, I'll build it in a way that suits my own needs, generalising where I think it suitable, and then publish it and iterate from there. However, this time I'd like to take a slightly different approach and introduce a new plug-in for DataTables, called SearchPane, before including it in the DataTables extensions. This is both to see if there is interest in the features it provides and to request feedback for things that you would like to see modified / improved / added / removed / etc.

First things first - what is SearchPane? Quite simply it is a column filter interface for DataTables. It presents a list of values that can be found in a column, displaying them for an end user to be able to click, searching the table for matching data. It is a column OR based filter - i.e. adding multiple options will display the rows which match any of those data points.

Let's take a look at it in action:

Name	Position	Office	Age	Start date	Salary
Tiger Nixon	System Architect	Edinburgh	61	2011-04-25	$320,800
Garrett Winters	Accountant	Tokyo	63	2011-07-25	$170,750
Ashton Cox	Junior Technical Author	San Francisco	66	2009-01-12	$86,000
Cedric Kelly	Senior Javascript Developer	Edinburgh	22	2012-03-29	$433,060
Airi Satou	Accountant	Tokyo	33	2008-11-28	$162,700
Brielle Williamson	Integration Specialist	New York	61	2012-12-02	$372,000
Herrod Chandler	Sales Assistant	San Francisco	59	2012-08-06	$137,500
Rhona Davidson	Integration Specialist	Tokyo	55	2010-10-14	$327,900
Colleen Hurst	Javascript Developer	San Francisco	39	2009-09-15	$205,500
Sonya Frost	Software Engineer	Edinburgh	23	2008-12-13	$103,600
Jena Gaines	Office Manager	London	30	2008-12-19	$90,560
Quinn Flynn	Support Lead	Edinburgh	22	2013-03-03	$342,000
Charde Marshall	Regional Director	San Francisco	36	2008-10-16	$470,600
Haley Kennedy	Senior Marketing Designer	London	43	2012-12-18	$313,500
Tatyana Fitzpatrick	Regional Director	London	19	2010-03-17	$385,750
Michael Silva	Marketing Designer	London	66	2012-11-27	$198,500
Paul Byrd	Chief Financial Officer (CFO)	New York	64	2010-06-09	$725,000
Gloria Little	Systems Administrator	New York	59	2009-04-10	$237,500
Bradley Greer	Software Engineer	London	41	2012-10-13	$132,000
Dai Rios	Personnel Lead	Edinburgh	35	2012-09-26	$217,500
Jenette Caldwell	Development Lead	New York	30	2011-09-03	$345,000
Yuri Berry	Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)	New York	40	2009-06-25	$675,000
Caesar Vance	Pre-Sales Support	New York	21	2011-12-12	$106,450
Doris Wilder	Sales Assistant	Sydney	23	2010-09-20	$85,600
Angelica Ramos	Chief Executive Officer (CEO)	London	47	2009-10-09	$1,200,000
Gavin Joyce	Developer	Edinburgh	42	2010-12-22	$92,575
Jennifer Chang	Regional Director	Singapore	28	2010-11-14	$357,650
Brenden Wagner	Software Engineer	San Francisco	28	2011-06-07	$206,850
Fiona Green	Chief Operating Officer (COO)	San Francisco	48	2010-03-11	$850,000
Shou Itou	Regional Marketing	Tokyo	20	2011-08-14	$163,000
Michelle House	Integration Specialist	Sydney	37	2011-06-02	$95,400
Suki Burks	Developer	London	53	2009-10-22	$114,500
Prescott Bartlett	Technical Author	London	27	2011-05-07	$145,000
Gavin Cortez	Team Leader	San Francisco	22	2008-10-26	$235,500
Martena Mccray	Post-Sales support	Edinburgh	46	2011-03-09	$324,050
Unity Butler	Marketing Designer	San Francisco	47	2009-12-09	$85,675
Howard Hatfield	Office Manager	San Francisco	51	2008-12-16	$164,500
Hope Fuentes	Secretary	San Francisco	41	2010-02-12	$109,850
Vivian Harrell	Financial Controller	San Francisco	62	2009-02-14	$452,500
Timothy Mooney	Office Manager	London	37	2008-12-11	$136,200
Jackson Bradshaw	Director	New York	65	2008-09-26	$645,750
Olivia Liang	Support Engineer	Singapore	64	2011-02-03	$234,500
Bruno Nash	Software Engineer	London	38	2011-05-03	$163,500
Sakura Yamamoto	Support Engineer	Tokyo	37	2009-08-19	$139,575
Thor Walton	Developer	New York	61	2013-08-11	$98,540
Finn Camacho	Support Engineer	San Francisco	47	2009-07-07	$87,500
Serge Baldwin	Data Coordinator	Singapore	64	2012-04-09	$138,575
Zenaida Frank	Software Engineer	New York	63	2010-01-04	$125,250
Zorita Serrano	Software Engineer	San Francisco	56	2012-06-01	$115,000
Jennifer Acosta	Junior Javascript Developer	Edinburgh	43	2013-02-01	$75,650
Cara Stevens	Sales Assistant	New York	46	2011-12-06	$145,600
Hermione Butler	Regional Director	London	47	2011-03-21	$356,250
Lael Greer	Systems Administrator	London	21	2009-02-27	$103,500
Jonas Alexander	Developer	San Francisco	30	2010-07-14	$86,500
Shad Decker	Regional Director	Edinburgh	51	2008-11-13	$183,000
Michael Bruce	Javascript Developer	Singapore	29	2011-06-27	$183,000
Donna Snider	Customer Support	New York	27	2011-01-25	$112,000
Name	Position	Office	Age	Start date	Salary

You can also see this example on its own and with a vertical display.

Initialisation

To be able to use SearchPane on your own pages, the first thing you'll need to do is include its CSS and Javascript on your page:

CSS

Then simply add the searchPane option to your DataTable initialisation, which will enable SearchPane with its default options:

$('#myTable').DataTable( {
    searchPane: true
} )

Options

As with the existing extensions, SearchPane can be configured through a number of options. This initial release has only four options:

container - A DOM node, or function that returns a DOM node, which the search panes should be added to. This allows you to insert the panes anywhere in the document. Since the search panes take up more screen space than the majority of DataTables extensions, this can be quite useful.
columns - The columns that should have search panes shown. This is a column-selector, and any of those options can be used. Note also that the threshold option (below) can have an affect on what columns are shown.
insert - Defines if the search panes should be appended to (append) or prepended (prepend) the element defined by the container option. The default value is prepend.
threshold - SearchPane calculates the variance of the distribution of the data in the column and uses that to decide automatically if the search pane should be shown for that column or not. For example it is relatively pointless to show a pane for a column where every value is unique - the end user would be as well looking through the main table. The default for this is set to be 0.5, but it can be altered if required. A column with different values in every cell, will have a variance of 0.

Example

The following example shows SearchPane being initialised in a DataTable with a container and threshold specified:

$('#example').DataTable( {
    searchPane: {
        container: '.searchPanes',
        threshold: 0
    }
} );

API

When the data in the table is updated, you'll want the search panes to reflect this updated data - which can be done with the searchPanes.rebuild() method - e.g.:

var table = $('#example').DataTable( {
    searchPane: true
} );

table.row.add( ... ).draw();
table.searchPanes.rebuild();

Feedback

So what do you think? Is this something that should continue to be developed, and built into a full extension for DataTables? Please leave feedback in this forum thread so feedback can be combined together in a single location.

Also, the software is open source under the MIT license, please fork and provide pull requests with any changes you add.

Enjoy!