DataTables example Read HTML to data objects

When DataTables reads the table content from an HTML table (rather than an Ajax or Javascript data source), by default it will read the information in the table into an array that DataTables stores internally. Each array element represents a column.

It can be very useful to have DataTables read the information into an object rather than an array, an option that can be triggered using the columns.dataDT initialisation option to define how you want the data to be stored. Typically columns.dataDT is used with Ajax sourced data to tell DataTables where to read data from, but as can be seen here it also tells DataTables where to write the data to.

This ability to store data into an object can be very useful when working with the DataTables API after the table has been initialised.

In the example shown here, the data read from each row in the table is read into a Javascript object with the structure:

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{
    "name":    "...",
    "position":   "...",
    "office":    "...",
    "age":      "...",
    "start_date": "...",
    "salary":    "..."
}

Please note that this feature requires DataTables 1.10.3 or newer.

NamePositionOfficeAgeStart dateSalary
NamePositionOfficeAgeStart dateSalary
Airi Satou Accountant Tokyo 33 2008/11/28 $162,700
Angelica Ramos Chief Executive Officer (CEO) London 47 2009/10/09 $1,200,000
Ashton Cox Junior Technical Author San Francisco 66 2009/01/12 $86,000
Bradley Greer Software Engineer London 41 2012/10/13 $132,000
Brenden Wagner Software Engineer San Francisco 28 2011/06/07 $206,850
Brielle Williamson Integration Specialist New York 61 2012/12/02 $372,000
Bruno Nash Software Engineer London 38 2011/05/03 $163,500
Caesar Vance Pre-Sales Support New York 21 2011/12/12 $106,450
Cara Stevens Sales Assistant New York 46 2011/12/06 $145,600
Cedric Kelly Senior Javascript Developer Edinburgh 22 2012/03/29 $433,060
Showing 1 to 10 of 57 entries

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

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$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#example').DataTable({
        "columns": [
            { "data": "name" },
            { "data": "position" },
            { "data": "office" },
            { "data": "age" },
            { "data": "start_date" },
            { "data": "salary" }
        ]
    });
} );

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