Help with sorting by date

Soundwaves

I have a fairly simple DataTable that works great, but I can't get the date sorting to work properly. I have read numerous examples and can't seem to get any of them to work.

I am displaying the date as follows.

<td style="text-align:center; font-weight:bold">
                <asp:Label ID="lblNPWOreqComp" runat="server" Width="50" Text='<%# Eval("requested_completion", "{0:MM/dd/yyyy}")%>'></asp:Label>
 </td>

and initializing my DataTable

<script type="text/javascript">
        $(document).ready(function () {
                $('#npwoList').dataTable({
                "lengthMenu": [25, 50, 75, 100],
                //paging: false,
                //"ordering": false,
                "scrolly": 400,
                "stateSave": true,
                "order": [[ 0, "desc" ]]
            });
            $('#npwoList tbody').on('click', 'tr', function () {
                var id = $('td', this).eq(0).text();
                document.getElementById('<%=txtWorkOrderId.ClientID%>').value = id;
                var clickButton = document.getElementById("<%= btnOpenNPWO.ClientID%>");
                clickButton.click();
            });
        });
    </script>

I have removed my attempts at sorting this column, can anyone show me where to implement proper sorting?
Thanks in advance!

jLinux

A date would fall under 'Orthogonal data'

https://datatables.net/manual/orthogonal-data

Heres an example with dates: https://datatables.net/examples/ajax/orthogonal-data.html

Soundwaves

This looks like it would work if I was getting my data from an ajax call, but I am populating the table from the server from a SQL database.
Is that true?

jLinux

but I am populating the table from the server from a SQL database. Is that true?

Are you asking me if you're populating the table from a SQL db?... lol. That would be something you would know, not I.

And for parsing the orthogonal data, you can use the columnDefs.render setting.

Heres a small demo I wrote for ya

That converts epoch to a formatted date, using the tools.date() function I created. Obviously you can do the opposite as well by creating your own function to convert the date into an epoch timestamp.

You can see in the columnDefs.render setting, I target column index #1, and for the Display and Filter, I show the formatted timestamp, but for sorting, it uses the epoch, which so that way it will sort them in the proper order.

jLinux

Im not quite sure what the difference between columns.render and columnDefs.render...

columns.render says:

The data that is returned by the columns.render option (regardless of if it is used as a function, integer or string) is what DataTables will use for the requested data type (this is called the resolved data)

But thats what columnDefs.render does as well.. o.O

@allan, why is columnDefs.render a 404?

Soundwaves

Thanks for such a complete answer, sorry about my poorly written response and thanks for the help.