jQuery dataTables plugin - how to ignore word from column sort

Question

I have a table of books with titles, authors, publishers, and dates in it. Under the title column a lot of the book titles start with the word "The." How can I setup the sort within the jquery datatables plugin to ignore the first word if it is "The" when sorting this column?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Maybe you can use something like this:

First you define a custom sorting type for your column for example "SongTitle". With datatables you can define new sorting type by specifying the comparison function:

$.fn.dataTableExt.oSort['SongTitle-asc']  = function(a,b) {
    // Modify your title a and your title b by putting "The" in the end
    // Return 1 if a > b
    // Return -1 if a < b
    // Return 0 if a == b
}

Remember to define the opposite function (this was for Ascending "asc" order)

$.fn.dataTableExt.oSort['SongTitle-desc']  = function(a,b) {
    return -1 * $.fn.dataTableExt.oSort['SongTitle-asc'](a,b);
}

Now to tell DataTables to use your sorting you pass the new value to aoColumns

"aoColumns": [
    { "sType": "SongTitle" },    // Title
    { "sType": "html" }          // for the next column
],

Answer 2

It would probably be easier to write a title jquery renderer that moves articles (The, A, An) to the end of the string.

The Sound of Music -> Sound of Music, The

You'd probably want to do the same thing for titles that begin with "A" and "An".