Alpha paging numbers plug-in?

jimv

Would it be difficult to write a plug in that would allow pagination by letter?
In other words, instead of
<1> <2> <3> <4> <5>
the pagination would be


Each letter would take you to the first page that contained that letter as the first letter in the item in the column.
First would still take you to the first page; last would take you to the last page; previous would take you to the previous page (not the previous letter); next would take you to the next page (not the next letter).
If there was numeric/date data mixed in with the alpha data, it would also have a <#> for those items.
It would have to use whatever column was the current sort column.
If the sort column was a non-alpha field, like a numeric field, or a date field, the pagination would be changed to the normal <1>....<5> pagination style.
It would work with server-side processing.
Thoughts?
I've been looking over the other pagination plugins to get ideas on how to do this, but any suggesions appreciated.
Thanks
Jim

allan

Interesting question - paging is currently done by number of rows only - however it probably is possible to create a plug-in which would do what you are looking for (although I don't know how you would do that with server-side processing...).

Having said that, filtering would seem like a more approachable method to be (I suppose depending on the interaction you want). You could just have "a b c e..." as links and then call fnFilter() with suitable parameters for the filter you want. That would be a lot easier to get working I suspect.

Allan