DT: An R interface to the DataTables library (2024)

2.1 Table CSS Classes

The class argument specifies the CSS classes of the table. The possible values can be found on the page of default styling options. The default value display basically enables row striping, row highlighting on mouse over, row borders, and highlighting ordered columns. You can choose a different combination of CSS classes, such as cell-border and stripe:

datatable(head(iris), class = 'cell-border stripe')

2.2 Styling

Currently, DT only supports the Bootstrap style besides the default style. You can use the argument style = 'bootstrap' to enable the Bootstrap style, and adjust the table classes accordingly using Bootstrap table class names, such as table-stripe and table-hover. Actually, DT will automatically adjust the class names even if you provided the DataTables class names such as stripe and hover.

DT:::DT2BSClass('display')## [1] "table table-striped table-hover row-border order-column display"DT:::DT2BSClass(c('compact', 'cell-border'))## [1] "table table-condensed table-bordered"

Note you can only use one style for all tables on one page. Please see this separate page for examples using the Bootstrap style.

2.3 Table Editing

You can enable table editing using the argument editable (see ?DT::datatable for its possible values). Then you will be able to double-click a cell to edit its value. It works in both client-side and server-side processing modes. Below are two client-side examples (also see a Shiny example with server-side processing):

DT::datatable(head(iris), editable = 'cell')

DT::datatable(head(iris), editable = list( target = 'row', disable = list(columns = c(1, 3, 4))))

2.4 Display Row Names

If the data object has row names, they will be displayed as the first column of the table by default. You can suppress row names via the argument rownames = FALSE, and you can also change row names by providing a different character vector to rownames.

datatable(head(mtcars))

datatable(head(mtcars), rownames = FALSE) # no row names

datatable(head(mtcars), rownames = head(LETTERS)) # new row names

2.5 Custom Column Names

By default, datatable() shows the column names of the data in the table, and you can use a custom character vector for the table header. There are a few possibilities. The first one is, you provide a new character vector to completely replace the column names of the data, e.g.

# colnames(iris) is a character vector of length 5, and we replace itdatatable(head(iris), colnames = c('Here', 'Are', 'Some', 'New', 'Names'))

This can be cumbersome if you only want to replace one or two names, and you do not want to provide a whole vector of names. Then here is the second possibility: you can provide a shorter numeric or character vector as the index vector to replace a subset of the column names. For example, if you only want the 2nd name to be 'A Nicer Name', you can use datatable(..., colnames = c('A Nicer Name' = 2)); or if you want to replace the name 'X5' with 'A Better Name', you can use colnames = c('A Better Name' = 'X5').

datatable(head(iris), colnames = c('A Better Name' = 'Sepal.Width'))

datatable(head(iris), colnames = c('Another Better Name' = 2, 'Yet Another Name' = 4))

When you display row names of the data, its column name will be a white space by default. That is why you cannot see its column name. You can certainly choose to use a column name for rownames as well, e.g.

# change the first column name to 'ID'datatable(head(iris), colnames = c('ID' = 1))

2.6 Custom Table Container

The container argument allows you to provide a different table container to hold the table cells. By default, the container is generated from the column names. Below is an example of a custom table header:

# a custom table containersketch = htmltools::withTags(table( class = 'display', thead( tr( th(rowspan = 2, 'Species'), th(colspan = 2, 'Sepal'), th(colspan = 2, 'Petal') ), tr( lapply(rep(c('Length', 'Width'), 2), th) ) )))print(sketch)

<table class="display"> <thead> <tr> <th rowspan="2">Species</th> <th colspan="2">Sepal</th> <th colspan="2">Petal</th> </tr> <tr> <th>Length</th> <th>Width</th> <th>Length</th> <th>Width</th> </tr> </thead></table>

# use rownames = FALSE here because we did not generate a cell for row names in# the header, and the header only contains five columnsdatatable(iris[1:20, c(5, 1:4)], container = sketch, rownames = FALSE)

You can also add a footer to the table container, and here is an example:

# a custom table with both header and footersketch = htmltools::withTags(table( tableHeader(iris), tableFooter(iris)))print(sketch)

<table> <thead> <tr> <th>Sepal.Length</th> <th>Sepal.Width</th> <th>Petal.Length</th> <th>Petal.Width</th> <th>Species</th> </tr> </thead> <tfoot> <tr> <th>Sepal.Length</th> <th>Sepal.Width</th> <th>Petal.Length</th> <th>Petal.Width</th> <th>Species</th> </tr> </tfoot></table>

datatable( head(iris, 10), container = sketch, options = list(pageLength = 5, dom = 'tip'), rownames = FALSE)

2.7 Table Caption

You can add a table caption via the caption argument. It can be either a character vector, or a tag object created from htmltools::tags$caption(). See this blog post for more information on table captions.

datatable( head(iris), caption = 'Table 1: This is a simple caption for the table.')

# display the caption at the bottom, and <em> the captiondatatable( head(iris), caption = htmltools::tags$caption( style = 'caption-side: bottom; text-align: center;', 'Table 2: ', htmltools::em('This is a simple caption for the table.') ))

2.8 Column Filters

DataTables does not provide column filters by default. There is only a global filter (the search box on the top-right). We added a filter argument in datatable() to automatically generate column filters. By default, the filters are not shown since filter = 'none'. You can enable these filters by filter = 'top' or 'bottom', depending on whether you want to put the filters on the top or bottom of the table.

iris2 = iris[c(1:10, 51:60, 101:110), ]datatable(iris2, filter = 'top', options = list( pageLength = 5, autoWidth = TRUE))

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