It can often be useful to be able to dynamically enable and disable buttons based on the document state and other components in the table. A typical example of this is to enable a button that will take action on a selected row in the table, only when there is a row selected! If there is no row selected, the button should not take any action when clicked upon (i.e. it is disabled).

This example demonstrates Buttons' ability to dynamically set the text of buttons through the button().text() method. Here the button's text will be updated to indicate the number of times it has been clicked upon.

There are also two other important aspects of the Buttons API demonstrated here:

The button().add() and button().remove() methods provide the ability to dynamically add and remove buttons from the list. The button().add() method takes two parameters: firstly the insertion point for where the new button should appear, and secondly a button definition (which can be an object, a string or a function) and displays that button.

Multiple button sets can coexist together sharing the same DataTable as a host. When using the API you need the ability to select one, or more, of those groups, and thus the buttons in them to be able to take whatever action is required. This is provided through the button-group-selector data type of the button() and buttons() methods.