DataTables example - Row selection

When you want to have user selectable rows in DataTables, it is relatively trivial when using DOM based data - but when using server-side processing, DataTables doesn't retain DOM row elements over pages / filtering etc. As such, you will need to keep a track of which rows a user as selected and mark them as selected on each draw.

This is shown in this demo, which uses a unique ID assigned to the TR element (this is done automatically through the use of the DT_RowId special property returned as part of the object given by the server for each row) to track which rows are selected and reselect them is appropriate on a draw.

Name Position Office Extn. Start date Salary
Name Position Office Extn. Start date Salary

The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:

$(document).ready(function() {
	var selected = [];

	$("#example").dataTable({
		"processing": true,
		"serverSide": true,
		"ajax": "scripts/ids-arrays.php",
		"rowCallback": function( row, data, displayIndex ) {
			if ( $.inArray(data.DT_RowId, selected) !== -1 ) {
				$(row).addClass('selected');
			}
		}
	});

	$('#example tbody').on('click', 'tr', function () {
		var id = this.id;
		var index = $.inArray(id, selected);

		if ( index === -1 ) {
			selected.push( id );
		} else {
			selected.splice( index, 1 );
		}

		$(this).toggleClass('selected');
	} );
} );

In addition to the above code, the following Javascript library files are loaded for use in this example:

The HTML shown below is the raw HTML table element, before it has been enhanced by DataTables:

This example uses a little bit of additional CSS beyond what is loaded from the library files (below), in order to correctly display the table. The additional CSS used is shown below:


The following CSS library files are loaded for use in this example to provide the styling of the table:

This table loads data by Ajax. The latest data that has been loaded is shown below. This data will update automatically as any additional data is loaded.