String column

Text is probably the most common data type when working with tables in WordPress. In this post we briefly explain how to work with text columns in wpDataTables.

String column is the default, and the most basic column type of wpDataTables. You can put any content in a string column, and it will be rendered “as is”. If you, for example, want to put some specific HTML (buttons, iframes, or anything else) in a string column, you can generate it in the data source, and it will be rendered on the front-end.

• Rendering rules: The only thing to note is that newline characters in the input data source will be translated to “<br/>” tag in the front-end.
  • Use values from another table (Foreign key) – This allows configuring a relation to another wpDataTable to show user names from a user’s table for example, instead of user ids. Please read the full tutorial on configuring table relations / foreign keys to see how this works.
• Sorting rules: alphabetical.
• Applicable filter types: text, selectbox, multi selectbox, checkbox.

Issues to note: if you use HTML inside of string columns, sorting and filtering by this column can in some cases yield strange results, since it will also apply the sorting rules to the HTML itself.

“First Name“, “Last Name” and “Position” columns of this table are string type columns:

• Creating editable tables and filling the table data manually
• Creating non-editable tables from Excel files
• Creating non-editable tables from Google Spreadsheets
• Integer columns
• Float columns
• Date columns
• DateTime columns
• Image columns
• URL link columns
• E-mail link columns
• Currency/price columns, and other columns with labels
• Formula (calculated) columns
• Coloring and styling columns
• Hiding columns