Date Sorting when not all rows have valid date

archie

Hi, we are using the ultimate date/time sorting plugin and this works fine when we have dates in the column but sometimes we have 'TBC'. When this is the case the date sorting doesn't work. Can anyone provide help on how to resolve this?
Thanks

rf1234

I guess you'd need to modify the code of the plugin a little.
https://datatables.net/plug-ins/sorting/datetime-moment

Looking at the code you might need to change this:

// Null and empty values are acceptable
        if ( d === '' || d === null ) {
            return 'moment-'+format;
        }

to be like this:

// Null , TBC and empty values are acceptable
        if ( d === '' || d === null || d === 'TBC') {
            return 'moment-'+format;
        }

allan

Orthogonal date is another option (set TBC to be 0 for the date integer). Or if you want to keep TBC always at the top or bottom of the table this blog post might be of interest.

Allan

colin

Yep, as @rf1234 says, you could do that. Another option, and perhaps more future proof if the plugin is updated for any reason, is to just columns.render your column so that the sort data returns something that moment already supports, for example:

  "columnDefs": [ {
    "targets": 4,
    "render": function ( data, type, row, meta ) {
      return type === 'sort' && data === 'TBC' ? '' : data;
    }
  } ]

Cheers,

Colin