Sorting dates in columns

sjw01

I see this: https://datatables.net/reference/option/columns.type

From what I understand, effectively a date column can only be sorted provided they are displayed as YYYY-MM-DD?

Is that right? The "limited set of dates" link to in the option shows YYYY-MM-DD ... YYYY/MM/DD

Which effectively is just sorting numerically and doesn't really require the field type to be a date? If I put the date into a format that allows sorting numerically, there is no point to defining a column type = date?

As can be seen, http://live.datatables.net/lidequra/21/edit - all date columns are displayed DD/MM/YY and don't sort

Am I misinterpreting the doco? Displaying the date as YYYY-MM-DD is really unfriendly and I want to avoid it?

xtech_dev

Check:
https://datatables.net/plug-ins/dataRender/datetime

It Man

MSLtd

Hello @sjw01
When you're using the DataTables date column you are limited to a very finite subset of formatting options, all of which I'm pretty sure, are in the format YYYY-MM-DD.

If you are wishing to have a user friendly format, I'd recommend using the render attribute of the column declaration in your table initiation, to render an HTML5 Input of type: date (<input type="date" name="inputFieldName">) in the editor and pushing the information around yourself.

In other news, I've had a play with the example and the date columns sort fine??

allan

Have a read over this blog post which goes into full details of date / time sorting in DataTables.

Allan

sjw01

@MSLtd It would appear that the column is sorted using the rendered data so we're back to square one. The columns definitely don't sort as required.

@allan thanks, i'll take a look

sjw01

I read over the blog post and I implemented moment exactly as described.

1. Included JS Files:

<script type="text/javascript" src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/moment.js/2.8.4/moment.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="//cdn.datatables.net/plug-ins/1.10.19/sorting/datetime-moment.js"></script>

1. Added column.type to the specified column:

{ title: "RO Date", type: "date" },

1. Added formatting to dataTable

$.fn.dataTable.moment( 'DD/MM/YY' );

Still wont sort date columns ???

http://live.datatables.net/lidequra/30/edit

allan

You had:

{ title: "RO Date", type: "date" },

Remove the type option. That is incorrectly forcing the data type. Allow DataTables to auto-detect the type.

Allan