jQuery DataTables: server-side example with php and xml, no database

Looking for a way to setup a server-side datatable using PHP to parse XML json?

Okay, I'm getting the data from wufoo and so I am also able to pull json. How can I get started with the following data?

{"Entries开发者_如何学C":[{"EntryId":"33","Field71":"","Field41":"John","Field42":"Smith","Field55":"","Field34":"2004","Field375":"Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports and Media","Field378":"Select One","Field4":"Kayak Outfitter","Field3":"Kayak Tours, Inc","Field7":"123 Main Street","Field8":"","Field9":"New York","Field10":"New York","Field11":"54209","Field12":"United States","Field19":"(555)555-5555","Field23":"contact@email.com","Field46":"http:\/\/www.website.com","Field21":"","Field49":"","Field6":"May>September","Field65":"","Field69":"","Field25":"","Field37":"Its all about Self-Motivation.","Field30":"Yes","Field31":"Yes","Field172":"","Field39":"","DateCreated":"2009-01-30 05:46:02","CreatedBy":"public","DateUpdated":"2010-08-08 22:23:30","UpdatedBy":"User"}]}

As Charles suggests DataTables will currently only accept a JSON input with a specific format. The reason for this is that supporting abstract formats would add a lot of overhead to both the internals and the initialisation (i.e. you'd need to tell it that you want it to use //articles/book@author or whatever).

So one option is to use fnServerData ( http://datatables.net/usage/callbacks#fnServerData ) to make your own Ajax call and get the XML - than transform it into the JSON format that DataTables needs with a simple loop.

Allan

Thanks for the sample data.

You're going to need to convert the data slightly.

DataTables can take a Javascript data structure (JSON), but it has to be an array of arrays.

Your sample data has a root element called Entries, which contains an array. That's great. Unfortunately each element in that array is currently a hash -- a key/value pair.

You need only the values from that pair, not the keys.

This Javascript will convert your Entries array-of-hashes into a plain old array-of-arrays. I'm using the Javascript 1.6 for each ... in syntax here because I had a brainfart and didn't remember that we're talking about a jQuery plugin here, and wrote it without that dependency.

var entries = /* JSON as provided in question */;
var new_array = new Array();
var el = entries['Entries'].length;
for(i = 0; i < el; i++) {
    var inner_array = new Array();
    for each (var value in entries['Entries'][i]) {
        inner_array[ inner_array.length ] = value;
    }
    new_array[ new_array.length ] = inner_array;
}

You can then pass new_array into the initial options hash's aaData option, as documented in the link I provided above. You will need to work out how to present the column headings yourself, given that you seem to have fallen into the anti-pattern of useless key names.