Issue when calling fnSetFilteringDelay() on multiple DataTables

mmatos

I lost an entire afternoon on what turned out to be a really stupid issue. I've been unable to find anyone with a similar issue so I figured I'd post it here just in case anyone else has a similar problem:

I have a page with two datatables. Both have server side processing, and both have links within them that open up within a colorbox. The colorbox content allows the users to edit records, so when they close the colorbox I have the datatable refresh.

Here's a portion of the dataTable initialization, which has worked well:

[code]
"fnServerParams": function (aoData) { aoData.push({ "name": "forcerefresh", "value": bForceRefresh }); },
"fnDrawCallback": function () {
$("#tblOneID a.boxit").colorbox({
width: "80%",
height: "90%",
iframe: true,
onClosed: function () {
bForceRefresh = true;
jQuery('#tblSubmitted').dataTable().fnDraw();
bForceRefresh = false;
}
});
}
[/code]

(Note: the bForceRefresh stuff is a parameter passed back to the server to tell my code to rebuild some objects instead of relying on cached objects. Not really relevant to this issue.)

Here's where I ran into major problems: Although each table has its own ID, they share a class name. I added FilteringDelay to both with this line of code:

[code]jQuery('.tableclass').dataTable().fnSetFilteringDelay();[/code]

This worked great...but I found that whenever the colorbox was closed, I was getting a JS error:
[quote]Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'oFeatures' of null[/quote]

This is what killed my afternoon.

Long story short, I replaced the line of code above with this:
[code]
jQuery('#tblOneID').dataTable().fnSetFilteringDelay();
jQuery('#tblTwoID').dataTable().fnSetFilteringDelay();
[/code]

This resolved the problem. I hope this helps someone else.

allan

Urgh :-(. Sorry that took some time to figure out. The good news is that the new API in DataTables 1.10 does not suffer from this issue. You'll be able to do something like `table.search.delay( 500 );` note that `delay()` will need to be a new plug-in, it is not built in, but it will apply to all tables matched by the selector. The API core has been committed and pagination control - work on the other aspects is ongoing :-).

Allan