DataTables has most features enabled by default, so all you need to do to use it with your own ables is to call the construction function: $().DataTable();.

Lets say you want to sort the fourth column (3) descending and the first column (0) ascending: your order: would look like this: order: [[ 3, 'desc' ], [ 0, 'asc' ]]

DataTables allows ordering by multiple columns at the same time, which can be activated in a number of different ways

When using tables to display data, you will often wish to display column information in groups. DataTables fully supports colspan and rowspan in the table's header, assigning the required order listeners to the TH element suitable for that column.

When customizing DataTables for your own usage, you might find that the default position of the feature elements (filter input etc) is not quite to your liking. To address this issue DataTables takes inspiration from the CSS 3 Advanced Layout Module and provides the dom initialization parameter which can be set to indicate where you wish particular features to appear in the DOM. You can also specify div wrapping containers (with an id and / or class) to provide complete layout flexibility.

The default page control presented by DataTables (forward and backward buttons with up to 7 page numbers in-between) is fine for most situations, but there are cases where you may wish to customise the options presented to the end user. This is done through DataTables' extensible pagination mechanism, the pagingType option.

This example shows the DataTables table body scrolling in the vertical direction. This can generally be seen as an alternative method to pagination for displaying a large table in a fairly small vertical area, and as such pagination has been disabled here (note that this is not mandatory, it will work just fine with pagination enabled as well!).

This example shows a vertically scrolling DataTable that makes use of the CSS3 (vh) unit in order to dynamically resize the viewport based on the browser window height. The (vh) unit is effectively a percentage of the browser window height. So the (50vh) used in this example is 50% of the window height. The viewport size will update dynamically as the window is resized.

Scroll - horizontal DataTables has the ability to show tables with horizontal scrolling, which is very useful for when you have a wide table, but want to constrain it to a limited horizontal display area. To enable x-scrolling simply set the scrollX parameter to be whatever you want the container wrapper's width to be (this should be 100% in almost all cases with the width being constrained by the container element).

In this example you can see DataTables doing both horizontal and vertical scrolling at the same time. Note also that pagination is enabled in this example, and the scrolling accounts for this.

A dot (.) is used to mark the decimal place in Javascript, however, many parts of the world use a comma (,) and other characters such as the Unicode decimal separator (⎖) or a dash (-) are often used to show the decimal place in a displayed number.