DataTables example Highlighting rows and columns

Highlighting rows and columns have be quite useful for drawing attention to where the user's cursor is in a table, particularly if you have a lot of narrow columns. Of course the highlighting of a row is easy enough using CSS, but for column highlighting, you need to use a little bit of Javascript.

This example shows that in action on DataTable by making use of the cell().index()DT method to get the index of the column that is to be operated on, and then the cells().nodes()DT and column().nodes()DT methods to remove old classes and apply the new highlighted class, respectively.

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() {
    var lastIdx = null;
    var table = $('#example').DataTable();
     
    $('#example tbody')
        .on( 'mouseover', 'td', function () {
            var colIdx = table.cell(this).index().column;
 
            if ( colIdx !== lastIdx ) {
                $( table.cells().nodes() ).removeClass( 'highlight' );
                $( table.column( colIdx ).nodes() ).addClass( 'highlight' );
            }
        } )
        .on( 'mouseleave', function () {
            $( table.cells().nodes() ).removeClass( 'highlight' );
        } );
} );

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