There are occasions where you might find it useful to be able to stop the selection of an item in a DataTable from happening when the user takes some action. This can be, for example, when they click on an icon in the row to edit or delete the row - instead of selecting the row it should perform whatever other task is required.
This can be done with the user-select event which is
cancellable. The user-select event will occur when the
event defined by select.selector
is triggered -typically a mouse click on a cell in the table. The event is cancelled by using e.preventDefault() or return false; from
the event handler.
This example demonstrates that ability by disallowing selection events from occurring on the first column in the table.
| Name | Position | Office | Age | Start date | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Position | Office | Age | Start date | Salary |
| 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 |
The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:
$(document).ready(function() {
var table = $('#example').DataTable( {
select: true
} );
table
.on( 'user-select', function ( e, dt, type, cell, originalEvent ) {
if ( $(originalEvent.target).index() === 0 ) {
e.preventDefault();
}
} );
} );
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:
#events {
margin-bottom: 1em;
padding: 1em;
background-color: #f6f6f6;
border: 1px solid #999;
border-radius: 3px;
height: 100px;
overflow: auto;
}
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.