Passing arguments to sAjaxSource in jQuery datatab

Question

I am working with CodeIgniter and I have the following problem.

I have a controller function in details.php which takes an argument:

function details($id) {
    $this->datatables
         ->select('product_id, original_amount, quantity')
         ->from('orders');

    echo $this->datatables->generate();
}  

Now I need to call this from views, i.e. I want DataTables to display it like so:

<script>
$(document).ready(function() 
  $('#example').dataTable({
    ...
    'sAjaxSource' : 'admin/data/details',
    ...
  });
</script>

So, how do I pass arguments to the sAjaxSource key, namely the $id variable?

Answer 1

You should use fnServerParams as specified in the docs.

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#example').dataTable( {
        "bProcessing": true,
        "bServerSide": true,
        "sAjaxSource": "scripts/server_processing.php",
        "fnServerParams": function ( aoData ) {
            aoData.push( { "name": "more_data", "value": "my_value" } );
        }
    } );
} );

Answer 2

I was struggling with this issue myself. The answer of John Moses didn't work for me, also the link he provides links to the new documentation which, I think, does not count for older versions of datatables.

Although, I found out that the current server side processing is working like jQuery, where older versions with "sAjaxSource" don't work that way.

For me, I just simpely added my parameters in the url of the sAjaxSource. So in your example code:

$customPHPvar = "mycustomvar";

<script>
$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#example').dataTable( {
        "bProcessing": true,
        "bServerSide": true,
        "sAjaxSource": "scripts/server_processing.php?customvar=<?php echo $customPHPvar; ?>",
    } );
} );
</script>

in server_processing.php

$_GET['customvar'];