Question

I’m using the marvellous DataTables jQuery plug-in; http://datatables.net/ Added the FixedColumns and KeyTable extras.

Now the table does resize prettily when the window size is changed. However, the containing div of the table can also be resized in width by a jQuery animation, and I haven’t found a way to resize the table with it– it just stays stagnant in its original width. Only if I change the div width in the code before pageload, the table is resized correctly.

How can I make the DataTable resize on-the-fly according to both the window width and the containing div width?

Answer 1

What is happening is that DataTables is setting the CSS width of the table when it is initialised to a calculated value – that value is in pixels, hence why it won’t resize with your dragging. The reason it does this is to stop the table and the columns (the column widths are also set) jumping around in width when you change pagination.

What you can do to stop this behaviour in DataTables is set the autoWidth parameter to false.

$('#example').dataTable( {
  "autoWidth": false
} );

That will stop DataTables adding its calculated widths to the table, leaving your (presumably) width:100% alone and allowing it to resize. Adding a relative width to the columns would also help stop the columns bouncing.

One other option that is built into DataTables is to set the sScrollX option to enable scrolling, as DataTables will set the table to be 100% width of the scrolling container. But you might not want scrolling.

The prefect solution would be if I could get the CSS width of the table (assuming one is applied – i.e. 100%), but without parsing the stylesheets, I don’t see a way of doing that (i.e. basically I want $().css(‘width’) to return the value from the stylesheet, not the pixel calculated value).