DataTables example Order direction sequence control

At times you may wish to change the default ordering direction sequence for columns (some or all of them) to be 'descending' rather than DataTables' default ascending. This can be done through the use of the columns.orderSequenceDT initialisation parameter. This parameter also allows you to limit the ordering to a single direction, or you could add complex behaviour to the ordering interaction.

The example below shows:

  • Column 1 - default ordering
  • Column 2 - default ordering
  • Column 3 - ascending ordering only
  • Column 4 - descending ordering, followed by ascending and then ascending again
  • Column 5 - descending ordering only
  • Column 6 - default ordering

It's worth noting that I don't have a good use case for when you might what to mix such complex ordering behaviour into a single table, but the example shows how these options can be use and therefore applied across all columns.

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

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$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#example').dataTable( {
        "aoColumns": [
            null,
            null,
            { "orderSequence": [ "asc" ] },
            { "orderSequence": [ "desc", "asc", "asc" ] },
            { "orderSequence": [ "desc" ] },
            null
        ]
    } );
} );

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