Upgrading to DataTables 1.7 from 1.6

As with other releases in the 1.x series of DataTables, the 1.7 release focuses on building on what has gone before, without breaking backwards compatibility. Having said that there are a few differences which must be taken into account:

Common upgrade issues

• Regular expression filtering:
  • bEscapeRegex has now been replaced by bRegex, which basically as the same meaning, but is the boolean NOT of bEscapeRegex. When bRegex is true, the filtering string is treated by DataTables as a regular expression, when it is false, the string is treated literally, rather than as a pattern. Any instance of bEscapeRegex must be updated. This was done to provide a more approachable filtering API as part of a wider tidy up.
• Deleting rows:
  • fnDeleteRow can no longer 'null' the target in aoData (DataTables' internal storage object for row information) due to internal changes for how deleting rows is performed. As such, the third parameter passed to fnDeleteRow has been replaced with a boolean indicator for if the table should be redrawn or not (like many of the other API functions have).

Changes for plug-in and API developers

• aoData:
  • It is no longer valid to have an entry in the aoData array as null. This would likely only have happened due to the deleting of a row using fnDeleteRow, but any code accessing aoData used to have to cope with null values. This is no longer the case.

Changes during the beta series

• bDestroy:
  • This parameter was incorrectly named bDestory up to and including beta 5. Corrected in beta 6.

By far the majority of DataTables users will be unaffected by these changes, so if you are not actively making use of these features already, DataTables 1.7 will be a drop in replacement for you.