Does Datatables' natural sort plugin work where data is got with server side processing?

Question

I got it to work with static html data as shown in this jsfiddle:

http://jsfiddle.net/L7PNV/

by specifying

aoColumns: {\"sType\": \"natural\"}
<         


        

Answer 1

No, I would say, you can't use this plugin when doing serverside processing.

As soon as you retrieve the data from an external source dataTables will just show a window of the data thats on the server. This can be thousands of rows, and this is the whole idea behind serversided processing. dataTables will just send a POST or GET request with some information to the server and will be given back just the fraction of data that fits in the current view. Clamped by pagenumber and items_per_page.

Also sorting and filtering is done on server side. So dataTables sends an request to the server every time you sort a column, click on the pagination or apply a filter. You can (for example use firebugs console to have a look at this request. You will find the actual page number, the amount of rows/page and sorting info for each of the rows in form of ASC or DESC.

Lets say your server uses PHP and MYSQL Then php would take this data, fetches its field from the db with LIMIT pagenumber*acutal_page, rows_per_page and ORDER BY field, ASC/DESC.

So in this case the sorting would be done by MySQL (which is not very good for natural sorting, although it is possible).

If you use mongoDB and/or node.js as underlying datasource it should be fairly easy to implement the (very advanced and awesome) sorting algorithm from dataTables, since this is plain javascript which can be handled by both.

But this has to happen on the serverside, on the client side dataTables will just see a fraction of the vast amount of data that is on your server.

Hope this helps a bit.