There are many ways to get your data into DataTables, and if you are working with seriously large databases, you might want to consider using the server-side options that DataTables provides. With server-side processing enabled, all actions that DataTables performs (such as paging, searching and ordering) are handed off to a server where an SQL engine (or similar) can perform these actions on the large data set (after all, that's what the database engine is designed for!). As such, each draw of the table will result in a new Ajax request to get the required data.
Server-side processing is enabled by setting the serverSide option to true and providing an Ajax data source through the ajax option.
This example shows a very simple table, matching the other client-side processing examples, but in this instance using server-side processing.
| First name | Last name | Position | Office | Start date | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First name | Last name | Position | Office | Start date | Salary |
The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:
$(document).ready(function () {
$('#example').DataTable({
processing: true,
serverSide: true,
ajax: 'scripts/server_processing.php',
});
});
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:
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.