Question

I am away from my development workstation so I thought I’d ask this in hopes of getting an answer when I try it tomorrow. I have a two part question relating to a web application i built using c# jquery and jquery datatables:

1) I know that we can set the value of fnfilter as metioned on their page using something like:

var oTable;
$(document).ready(function() {
oTable = $('#example').dataTable();

/* Filter immediately */
oTable.fnFilter( 'test string' );
} );

however is there a way to retrieve the value entered by the use in the search bar? I was thinking along the lines of
var aContainer= oTable.fnFilter()
or
var aContainer= oTable.fnFilter($(this).html())

2) My application has to retrieve values from another source on the web. These are the value displayed in the datatable. Most of my processing(counting, etc..) is done client side and has drastically slowed down generating the web app. Does anyone know of any suggestions to increase performance of client side scripts specifically datatables?

Answer 1

If your datatable is really instantiated as oTable = $('#example').dataTable(); then doing this:

var textEntered = $('#example_filter input:text')[0].value;

Should return whatever the user entered on the field for filtering.