Custom per-column filtering on server-side

Custom per-column filtering on server-side

Jens GutzeitJens Gutzeit Posts: 22Questions: 0Answers: 0
edited January 2010 in General
Hello allan and others,

I'll start by explaining what I have done so far:
I have a input text box on top of each column, people can enter their text fragments there.
The server-side is prepared to do some LIKE queries against our database.

Now I'm a bit unsure after reading a bit source code and some API documentation regarding the filter functions. Filtering on the database may took up to a few seconds because of many columns, not limited number of filterings and somewhat large number of rows, so type-ahead, or even column by column filtering is not applicable here, our customer needs to have a button to start the filtering manually. Is there some internal function or variable I can access to store the filter-settings or should I work arround datatables this time, and implement that via a custom array of Post parameters and a merge with datatables default one in my fnServerData?

BTW: we're approximately 80% done with integration of dataTables and I want to say it one more time: we love it! I'll talk to our people to do some donation by february or march for your great work.

Replies

  • allanallan Posts: 61,446Questions: 1Answers: 10,054 Site admin
    Hi Jens,

    When you say "button to start the filtering manually", I'm not sure what you mean. From a Javascript point of view, filtering in DataTables revolves around the fnFilter function. You pass it what you want to filter on (so it can be a single character, or a full string or whatever) and this will then be sent to the server as there parameter sSearch_{column-index}, at which point the server can do column based filtering. My example PHP script should include an example of how to do this on the server-side.

    Does that answer your question?

    Regards,
    Allan
  • Jens GutzeitJens Gutzeit Posts: 22Questions: 0Answers: 0
    Hello Allan,

    the problem I have is that fnFilter takes one column, and then does the filtering/the request to the server. What I like to do is having the input boxes without this "automatic request sending". Let's take this one for example:

    http://datatables.net/examples/api/multi_filter.html

    I would like to enter values in the column, and then start the filtering request manually, so I can send all sSearch_ in the first request. Hopefully this is more clear now.

    Thanks,
    Jens
  • allanallan Posts: 61,446Questions: 1Answers: 10,054 Site admin
    Hi Jens,

    Right, so you want to remove the 'keyup' event handler. So you can do this quite easily - in the example you can see I've got "$("tfoot input").keyup( function () {" - what you want to do instead is to submit your search data to fnFilter when the user clicks on a button or hits return, or whatever you want the interaction to be. It's all about how you call fnFilter - once that has been called, then the filter will occur.

    Regards,
    Allan
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