How do I sort by a hidden column in DataTables?

Question

When I apply DataTables to the following:

<td class="years"><?php $years."-years" ?></td>
<td class="..." ...
... other <td> ...

my table displays as follows:

10-years ... ... ...
10-years ... ... ...
5-years  ... ... ...
7-years  ... ... ...
9-years  ... ... ...

because of the alphabetic ordering. I need 10-years to appear at the bottom. To do that I added <td class="hidden"><?php $years ?></td> right after <td class="years"><?php $years."-years" ?></td> and added "order": [ 1, 'asc' ] to the datatable initialization:

$(".table-rates").DataTable( {
   "order": [ 1, 'asc' ]
});

after which it stopped working and started reporting an error in the console: "Cannot read property 'mData' of undefined".

Can someone explain how I can sort by a hidden column in my DataTables? I looked up online, but the solutions did not work for me. Even worse, the syntax is extremely confusing and hard to follow. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Can you please add error you get? – Hayk Mantashyan Jun 28 '16 at 14:45 — Hayk Mantashyan, Jun 28 '16 at 14:45
"Cannot read property 'mData' of undefined" – Alex Jun 28 '16 at 14:53 — Alex, Jun 28 '16 at 14:53

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited May 03 '23 at 06:31

8

It's unnecessary to add other column, you can use data-attributes of datatable, add in your html code data-order:

<td class="years" data-order="<?php $years ?>"><?php $years."-years" ?></td>

And your code JS:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#example').DataTable({
        "order": [ 0, 'asc' ]
    });
});

Result: https://jsfiddle.net/cmedina/7kfmyw6x/69/

edited May 03 '23 at 06:31

ihightower

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answered Jun 28 '16 at 15:00

CMedina

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This works like a charm. I must upote the solution. – Maulik Kayastha Jun 25 '20 at 05:46

How do I sort by a hidden column in DataTables?

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