Landing page demo breakdown

Wednesday 18th June, 2025

By Allan Jardine

The DataTables landing page has an example table that demonstrates a range of the capabilities that the software has. The initialisation code for this example is quite interesting and I thought it would be instructive to do a line-by-line breakdown explaining the options used and the decisions behind the use of each option.

In this post, I'll work through a number of iterations, building up the full example and explaining each step as part of an implementation process. While this post will cover a lot of the basics of DataTables, touching on installation and initialisation, it is not intended to be a Javascript from first principles post. I'll assume you know how to use querySelector, addEventListener, what objects are, etc.

Goals

As with all landing page demos, the goal here is to quickly show some of what DataTables is capable of, look attractive, be functional and also approachable. As such there is a balance to be struck between the wide range of options that DataTables and its extensions provide and not overwhelming those new to the software.

Based on that I've elected to use a table which:

Uses the core DataTables features
- Paging and page length
- Search
- Ordering
- Table summary
- Localise data display
Is "responsive" - i.e. automatically adjusts the number of columns in the table based on the screen width so it works well on mobile and desktop screens)
Provides some advanced search options.

There is so much more that it would be possible to show - Excel / PDF export, fixed headers, scrolling and others, but it could quickly get overwhelming and I'm a big proponent of the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid) - the are lots of other examples available on the site if someone likes the look of DataTables from this example and wants to learn more.

The demo

Before we start rooting through the code, let's see the DataTable with these features all enabled:

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

Installation

For this use case, I'm going to include DataTables with simple script elements. You could readily include it using npm or some other package manager and use it in Typescript if you wish, but again, let's keep this discussion simple.

The starting place for DataTables installation is always the download builder. No matter what installation method you use it will help you get up and running, providing script tags, npm packages, etc. In this case, we know we want DataTables, ColumnControl and Responsive, so go ahead and select those options. If you don't already have jQuery on your page, select that as well - DataTables uses it as a utility library.

More details on installation of DataTables are available in the manual.

Basic initialisation

Creating a DataTable is simple, you just need to create a new instance of the DataTable variable, passing in the selector to pick the table from the document, and any initialisation options you want:

new DataTable('#myTable', {
    // ... options
});

Stage 1: This is how our demo table currently looks.

Note that the table is paged, and has control elements placed around the table. It can also be ordered by clicking on the table headers.

Localising data

The next step is to localise the data that is displayed. This is important as we want the data to be instantly recognisable and understandable for the end user. DataTables has several built-in helper functions that we can use for this, which we need to assign to the columns with appropriate data (DataTables doesn't reformat the data by default). This is done with the columnDefs option which lets us assign configuration options to specific columns:

new DataTable('#myTable', {
    columnDefs: [
        {
            target: 4,
            render: DataTable.render.date(),
        },
        {
            target: 5,
            render: DataTable.render.number(null, null, 0, '$'),
        }
    ]
} );

In the above:

Line 1: Our initialisation of the DataTable, as before
Line 2: Using the columnDefs array configuration option to assign options to columns
Line 4: Assigning the options in this object to column index 4
Line 5: Using the date renderer to transform the original ISO8061 date into the user's locale. These vary around the world!
Line 9: Similarly the decimal and thousands separators vary around the world and we use a formatter to use a locale-specific character.

Stage 2: Demo table with formatted data.

Responsive

Next up, we want the table to fit into the end user's screen width without overflowing horizontally. DataTables has a Responsive extension for exactly this behaviour. In its most simple form we just need to enable the responsive option to benefit from this behaviour.

let tableEl = document.querySelector('#myTable');

tableEl.classList.add( 'nowrap' );

new DataTable(tableEl, {
    columnDefs: [
        {
            target: 4,
            render: DataTable.render.date(),
        },
        {
            target: 5,
            render: DataTable.render.number(null, null, 0, '$'),
        }
    ],
    responsive: true
} );

There is a small change to the initialisation structure here - let's break it down:

Line 1: Use querySelector to get the table for the DataTable. This is because we want to use it twice
Line 3: Add the class of nowrap to the table. This is entirely optional and isn't needed for Responsive, but if not used the browser will cause text with white space to wrap onto a second line. That can be desirable in some cases, but in this one, I'd like all lines to be of equal height to keep the interface tidy.
Line 5: The table element is passed as the target for the DataTable to initialise on. This has the same effect as when '#myTable' was given, in this case, it just uses the already found element.
Line 16: Responsive is enabled with the responsive option.

Stage 3: Demo table with Responsive enabled.

ColumnControl

We are nearly at the final code - all that is needed now is to add ColumnControl for column-specific search controls and extra control buttons.

ColumnControl is completely customisable and requires you to specify what content you want to display in the column headers - this is done by an array of content types given to the columnControl option, with the option of providing column specific configurations, which we make use of here.

This is the code updated with ColumnControl:

let tableEl = document.querySelector('#myTable');

tableEl.classList.add( 'nowrap' );

new DataTable(tableEl, {
    columnControl: [
        'order',
        ['search', 'spacer', 'orderAsc', 'orderDesc', 'orderClear']
    ],
    columnDefs: [
        {
            targets: [1, 2],
            columnControl: [
                'order',
                ['searchList', 'spacer', 'orderAsc', 'orderDesc', 'orderClear']
            ],
        },
        {
            target: 4,
            render: DataTable.render.date(),
        },
        {
            target: 5,
            render: DataTable.render.number(null, null, 0, '$'),
        }
    ],
    ordering: {
        indicators: false
    },
    responsive: true
} );

Again, breaking it down line-by-line:

Line 6: Specify a ColumnControl array of content. This consists of:
Line 7: An ordering icon / button. This takes the place of the default DataTables ordering indicator, but functions in the same fashion.
Line 8: A sub-array in the ColumnControl content array will create a dropdown. In this case, the dropdown includes a column search, and then order control buttons in a second section.
Lines 11-16: The data in the second and third columns lend themselves to having a list of options for search rather than free text input, due to repeating terms (although both could be used!). As such, we configure ColumnControl for these two columns similar to the global configuration, but in this case, using the searchList option.
Line 28: Use the ordering.indicators option to disable the DataTables default sort icons. We've got the ColumnControl button for this now, so remove the duplicate information.

Stage 4: Complete demo.

Wrapping up

There we have it - how the code is built for the DataTables landing page demo, and the reasons for it being the way it is! As noted above, this only scratches the surface of the range of configuration options that DataTables offers.

If you are just starting out with DataTables, I'd encourage you to look at the examples and the extensions to get a fuller idea of what DataTables can offer.

I hope you've found this article useful and as always, feedback and questions are welcome - please create a new post in the forum if you have any questions that arise from this post.