Column descriptions
Occasionally, you will have a column that conveys particularly complex information which might not be entirely clear to the end user at first glance. In
such cases it can be useful to provide context information but without cluttering the screen, or taking unnecessary space. For such cases, ColumnControl has a
info content type.
This content type will show a button which, when hovered over, will show a tooltip with the explanation text. By default, it will look for a
title attribute on the th element for the column header and use that. If not found, no information icon
will be shown for the column (the context information can also be set per column in Javascript, although that is more verbose in the code).
This example shows two columns with title attributes, and the corresponding information tooltips are shown when the cursor is moved over them
(optionally, a click can be used to activate the tooltip).
| Name | Position | Office | Extn. | Start date | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Position | Office | Extn. | Start date | Salary |
- Javascript
- HTML
- CSS
- Ajax
- Server-side script
- Comments
The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:
new DataTable('#myTable', {
ajax: '../../../../examples/ajax/data/objects.txt',
columnControl: ['info', 'order'],
columns: [
{ data: 'name' },
{ data: 'position' },
{ data: 'office' },
{ data: 'extn' },
{ data: 'start_date' },
{ data: 'salary' }
],
ordering: {
indicators: false,
handler: false
}
});
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.
The script used to perform the server-side processing for this table is shown below. Please note that this is just an example script using PHP. Server-side processing scripts can be written in any language, using the protocol described in the DataTables documentation.