Getting column.type via API

JammySlayer

I'd like to be able to find the type set via options within the API but can't seem to find a way of retrieving it?

allan

There isn't currently an API method for that I'm afraid. What's the use case?

Allan

JammySlayer

Doing basically what's said in here:
https://datatables.net/reference/api/column().cache()

I've noticed that it messes up the ordering for certain types, I attempted to fix it using

options.unique().sort(jQuery.fn.dataTableExt.oSort["natural-asc"]);

Which fixed the 1, 10, 2, 3 issue, but I've also got date's in selects, which appear 1 Feb 2017, 2 Jan 2000, 3 Mar 2018, etc

So I figure if I can grab the type I can work out which form of sort to use on as the comparator.

allan

Ah I see - you want to get the list of data from a column (or other data point) in the same order that DataTables would sort it based on the data type? That's something I've thought about a number of times and plan to introduce it in future.

The only way to get the type information for a column is from the private settings store (table.settings()[0].aoColumns[i].sType). It is worth noting that the settings parameters might change in future versions (I don't currently have any plans to change that one, but who knows where development leads sometimes...).

Allan

JammySlayer

That works, thanks, be nice if there was column.type() to return that value though!

Using :
column.settings()[0].aoColumns[column.index()].sType

Due to my use case of having the column

allan

There is a good chance that there will be in v2!

Allan

JammySlayer

Doh, just worked out an issue, can't find auto detection namely we're using Moment for dates, so the type for the dates is number as we're passing a unix date from the back end and using render to convert it to a moment date, which we then use datetime-moment.js to do our ordering with. Am I able to leverage the same method some how, or is the resolved type available somewhere?

allan

The resolved type is returned by the $.fn.dataTable.moment function.

Allan

JammySlayer

Worked out why it was still saying num, fell over orthogonal data, "type" wasn't being used currently in this instance.