django datatables additional data from server to template

Question

So I have implemented the dataTables plugin with django server-side processing. Looks a little like this:

template:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function() {
    $('#example').dataTable( {
        "bProcessing": true,
        "bServerSide": true,
        "sAjaxSource": "/datatable/"
    } );
} );

</script>

views:

def main_view(request):
    return render_to_response('index.html')

def datatables_view(request):
    start = request.GET['iDisplayStart']
    length = request.GET['iDisplayLength']

    query = myUser.objects.all()
    total = query.count()

    if request.GET.has_key('sSearch'):
        # filtering...


    query = query[start:start+length]
    response = {"aaData": [(q.name, q.state, q.email) for q in query],
                "iTotalRecords": total,  
                ...additional params for dataTable... }

Then I use json.dump to serialize the data and send it like so

s = json.dump(response)
return HttpResponse(s.read())

this might be a little wrong, but that's because I'm not using my actual code but rather writing it down from memory. It isn't important if there's any mistakes here just get that this is the general idea... (also, I use json because I'm running this on django 1.5 where simplejson is deprecated).

So like I said, this works fine. The url for the page works with the main_view and the datatables sends its ajax calls to datatables_view and everything ticks. Now I want to send some additional data from the server (and not to the server). As in, I want to add some data to be used inside the template. This data has to come from the datatables_view because it relies on the current query and should be dynamic. say I add this to the response:

    response = {"aaData": [(q.name, q.state, q.email) for q in query],
                "iTotalRecords": total,
                 ...additional params for dataTable...,
                "sMeow": query.filter(name='cat')[:20]}

This is obviously an example, but the point is that when you change the query (say you filter by a search word or you change the ordering) then sMeow will also change. And then I want to access it somehow on the template. Obviously I can't just do this:

{{ sMeow }}

But I also can't use parseJSON because this isn't something that the documents receives, it's something that the datatable receives and I need to use the API to access it, though I can't find how to do that.

Since eventually I'd have a button that runs some script on the sMeow values (and send it to a different request) I had a look at the tabletools plugin but it doesn't really play well with server-side ("TableTools is more focused on the client-side" source).

I'm not shy from using additional plugins though I rather use the default capabilities of datatables. Any help would be appreciated!

Josh Smeaton · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-29 04:56:34Z

1

I also use datatables with django, including server side processing. The problem with what you want to achieve is that datatables itself is making a very specific request to the url, and expecting certain data so it can update the table.

You could possibly implement a custom fnServerData function, extract your sMeow value and do your processing, and then delegate to fnCallback for datatables to update the table. However, this will only allow you to use the sMeow values from javascript, since the processing is happening client-side (so no django templating).

Taking the code example directly from the link above (and adding a little, see comments):

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#example').dataTable( {
        "bProcessing": true,
        "bServerSide": true,
        "sAjaxSource": "../examples_support/server_processing.php",
        "fnServerData": function ( sSource, aoData, fnCallback ) {
            $.getJSON( sSource, aoData, function (json) { 
                var obj = JSON.parse(json);
                var smeow = obj['sMeow'];
                // do what you need with smeow
                fnCallback(json);
            });
        }
    });
});

edited Aug 29, 2013 at 4:56

answered Aug 28, 2013 at 12:07

Josh Smeaton

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1 Comment

yuvi Over a year ago

Could you show me a code example how you would do that? I get the idea but I'm still pretty novice with jQuery

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