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

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.