The DataTables is a highly flexible tool, based upon the foundations of progressive enhancement, and will add advanced interaction controls to any HTML table. DataTables has most features enabled by default, so all you need to do to use it with your own tables is to call the construction function. Searching, ordering, paging etc goodness will be immediately added to the table, as shown in this example. Datatables support all available table styling.

The default page control (forward and backward buttons with up to 7 page numbers in-between) is fine for most situations, but in some cases you may wish to customise the options presented to the end user. This is done through DataTables' extensible pagination mechanism, the pagingType option. Supported pagination types are: simple, simple_numbers, full and full_numbers. This example shows simple pagination type.

DataTables has the option of being able to save the state of a table: its paging position, ordering state etc., so that is can be restored when the user reloads a page, or comes back to the page after visiting a sub-page. This state saving ability is enabled by the stateSave option. The duration for which the saved state is valid can be set using the stateDuration initialisation parameter (2 hours by default).

This example shows the DataTables table body scrolling in the vertical direction. This can generally be seen as an alternative method to pagination for displaying a large table in a fairly small vertical area, and as such pagination has been disabled here. Note that this is not mandatory, it will work just fine with pagination enabled as well!.