Editor 3.0

This document is the upgrade notes for Editor 3.0, which is released alongside DataTables 3.0. DataTables 3+ is a dependency for Editor 3, and DataTables provides utility libraries that Editor uses to keep its code size small. The upshot is, upgrade both DataTables and Editor together!

Editor is now part of DataTables Plus - a set of premium extensions for DataTables. While Editor used to be sold as a single add-on for DataTables, it is now fully part of the suite of extensions for DataTables with all the benefits that has - specifically:

• Editor is now available on the CDN
• Editor is also available via the central NPM repository

You can of course still download the software and host it yourself, but that is no longer a requirement. If you use the download builder you'll find that you can select and use Editor with any of the download options.

Licence key

To make this possible, Editor now makes use of the DataTable.key() method which is used to given DataTables your licence key. You can view your licence key on the download page, and on your account page.

If you have purchased Editor in the last year, you will automatically have been assigned a licence key and as part of the upgrade process, that key should now be used - e.g.:

import DataTable from 'datatables.net-dt';
import Editor from 'datatables.net-editor-dt';

// License key registration
DataTable.key('editor_1_2026-12-20:gj2Hdcq....');

// Use DataTables and Editor as normal!
const editor = new Editor({
    // ...
});

const table = new DataTable('#myTable', {
    // ...
});

New features

No new release is complete without new features, and Editor 3 has a number of them!

Static display controller

Editor now has a third built-in display controller: static. It provides the ability to have the editing for appear in any HTML element that you specify through the display option. You can see an example here.

If you've used Editor extensively in the past, you'll know that display can be used to select which display controller is to be used for a form (normally a popover modal). That ability remains, but if given as a string, it will be treated as a CSS selector to pick a matching element and static used.

Data source

Editor has a new dataSrc option which can be used to tell the software to get the data to edit from a server-side, rather than from a database or from the HTML. Combine the static display controller and this new ability and Editor now makes it very easy to create "whole editing" pages - i.e. a web-page that is dedicated to editing or creating a specific record.

This is one of those cases where an example is worth a thousand words - and this example provides exactly that.

Python server-side libraries

We've long provided server-side libraries for Node.js, .NET and PHP, but this is the first release of Python libraries for Editor. They make use of SQLAlchemy Core to support multiple different database types, but maintains the familiar API that the other server-side libraries for DataTables and Editor use.

The Python libraries for DataTables and Editor are available on pypi and can be installed with:

pip install datatables_server

A demo app with all of the Editor examples from this site is available using the Python libraries on the Editor demo app download page.

You can read more about the Python libraries in their manual. Please note that these libraries are currently considered beta. Please let me know if you have any feedback about them.

Release notes

There are of course a number of other smaller features and fixes. For full details, please refer to the release notes.