Preamble

Using DataTables in-combination with the excellent jEditable plugin for jQuery allows you to produce a table which can have individual cells edited. The table can then be updated such that filtering, sorting etc. will all work as expected. This is showing in the demo below.

The example shows how a table element can be edited (you could limit to a particular column if you wish using the selector), posted to the server (for saving in a database or whatever) and then placed back into the DataTable. The server's processing in this example simply appends the string '(server updated)' to indicate that something has happened on the server.

Note also that this example makes use of the information in the 'ID' attribute of the TR element. This is useful in order to tell the server what row is being updated - this can readily be expended to include column information as required. Further to this, it is worth noting that to use this type of example with DataTables' server-side processing option, you must use fnDrawCallback to apply the event listeners on each draw.

Finally, if you are interested in a full CRUD implementation for DataTables, check out the Editor plug-in for DataTables, which provides a flexible and easy to use create, edit and delete environment for DataTables controlled tables with full server interaction.

Live example

Initialisation code

$(document).ready(function() {
	/* Init DataTables */
	var oTable = $('#example').dataTable();
	
	/* Apply the jEditable handlers to the table */
	oTable.$('td').editable( '../examples_support/editable_ajax.php', {
		"callback": function( sValue, y ) {
			var aPos = oTable.fnGetPosition( this );
			oTable.fnUpdate( sValue, aPos[0], aPos[1] );
		},
		"submitdata": function ( value, settings ) {
			return {
				"row_id": this.parentNode.getAttribute('id'),
				"column": oTable.fnGetPosition( this )[2]
			};
		},
		"height": "14px",
		"width": "100%"
	} );
} );

Other examples