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This site contains the legacy documentation for DataTables v1.9 and earlier for reference only.
DataTables 1.10 is the current release and is now available.
DataTables dynamic creation example

Preamble

At times you will wish to be able to create a table from dynamic information passed directly to DataTables, rather than having it read from the document. This is achieved using the "aaData" array in the initialisation object. A table node must first be created before the initialiser is called (as shown in the code below). This is also useful for optimisation - if you are able to format the data as required, this method can save a lot of DOM parsing to create a table.

Live example

Initialisation code

$(document).ready(function() {
	$('#demo').html( '<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" class="display" id="example"></table>' );
	$('#example').dataTable( {
		"aaData": [
			/* Reduced data set */
			[ "Trident", "Internet Explorer 4.0", "Win 95+", 4, "X" ],
			[ "Trident", "Internet Explorer 5.0", "Win 95+", 5, "C" ],
			[ "Trident", "Internet Explorer 5.5", "Win 95+", 5.5, "A" ],
			[ "Trident", "Internet Explorer 6.0", "Win 98+", 6, "A" ],
			[ "Trident", "Internet Explorer 7.0", "Win XP SP2+", 7, "A" ],
			[ "Gecko", "Firefox 1.5", "Win 98+ / OSX.2+", 1.8, "A" ],
			[ "Gecko", "Firefox 2", "Win 98+ / OSX.2+", 1.8, "A" ],
			[ "Gecko", "Firefox 3", "Win 2k+ / OSX.3+", 1.9, "A" ],
			[ "Webkit", "Safari 1.2", "OSX.3", 125.5, "A" ],
			[ "Webkit", "Safari 1.3", "OSX.3", 312.8, "A" ],
			[ "Webkit", "Safari 2.0", "OSX.4+", 419.3, "A" ],
			[ "Webkit", "Safari 3.0", "OSX.4+", 522.1, "A" ]
		],
		"aoColumns": [
			{ "sTitle": "Engine" },
			{ "sTitle": "Browser" },
			{ "sTitle": "Platform" },
			{ "sTitle": "Version", "sClass": "center" },
			{ "sTitle": "Grade", "sClass": "center" }
		]
	} );	
} );

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