TableTools example - Row selection - row selector on specific cells

# TableTools example Row selection - row selector on specific cells

By default, TableTools' row selector option will register a row selection click on any part of the row. Although this is often desirable, you might wish at times to limit the row selection to just a single column, or other elements in the row. This might be useful, for example, with Editor's inline editing, so you don't select the row on click of a cell that is to be edited.

The `sRowSelector` method provides this ability, allowing a custom jQuery selector to be passed in. TableTools will use the parent row of any element that is selected by the end user.

In this case, the row selector is attached to the cells in the first column of the table, and Font Awesome is used to display a checkbox indicating the selection state of the row, in addition to the row background colouring.

| Name | Position | Office | Age | Start date | Salary
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---

- Javascript
- HTML
- CSS
- Ajax
- Server-side script

The Javascript shown below is used to initialise the table shown in this example:

`$(document).ready(function() { $('#example').DataTable( { ajax: "../../../examples/ajax/data/objects.txt", columns: [ { data: null, defaultContent: '', orderable: false }, { data: 'name' }, { data: 'position' }, { data: 'office' }, { data: 'extn' }, { data: 'start_date' }, { data: 'salary' } ], order: [ 1, 'asc' ], dom: 'T<"clear">lfrtip', tableTools: { sRowSelect: 'os', sRowSelector: 'td:first-child', aButtons: [ 'select_all', 'select_none' ] } } ); } );`

In addition to the above code, the following Javascript library files are loaded for use in this example:

- ../../../media/js/jquery.js
- ../../../media/js/jquery.dataTables.js
- ../js/dataTables.tableTools.js

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:

`tr td:first-child { text-align: center; } tr td:first-child:before { content: "\f096"; /* fa-square-o */ font-family: FontAwesome; } tr.selected td:first-child:before { content: "\f046"; /* fa-check-square-o */ }`

The following CSS library files are loaded for use in this example to provide the styling of the table:

- ../../../media/css/jquery.dataTables.css
- ../css/dataTables.tableTools.css
- //cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/4.0.3/css/font-awesome.css

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.