THE DOCUMENTATION

Intro

This is a set of helpers for communicating with JQuery Datatables. They can be used to access native DataTables server-side Ajax objects, which are normally difficult to use with ASP.NET MVC. This library doesn't have any "magic" inside like other DataTables binders, it's simple by design.

Usage

It's easiest to start with the provided example code, but we use some options like per-column search and the code is pretty verbose. Below is the minimum DataTables initialization to forward the correct data to the server, which only supports paging.

Demo and Example Code

• Example code is included within the solution in this repo.
• For production use you'll probably want to install the nuget package.
• Example code demo is running here.

View (client side)

var table = $('#example').DataTable({
    "serverSide": true,
    "ajax": {
        //ALWAYS USE POST. Sometimes DataTables will pass you a big object and you will pass query string size limit
        "type": "POST",
        "url": "@Url.Action("Your Controller Action")",
        "data": function (d) {
			//we tell datatables to pass its object inside of a JSON string because MVC can't bind it properly.
            return { myDataTableParameter: JSON.stringify(d) };
        }
    }
});

Controller Action

[HttpPost]//always use post, see client side call in index view
public ActionResult AjaxDtAction(string myDataTableParameter)
{
    //we pass in table as a JSON string because the MVC model binder is utterly incapable of parsing datatables output.
    //Parse into Datatables structure
    var TableIn = DataTablesIn.ParseJSONString(myDataTableParameter);
    //load from database or wherever
    IQueryable<DataItem> DataQry= GetData();
	
	//recordsFiltered should be set to # of records from query before paging is applied
    var recordsFiltered = DataQry.Count();
	
    //paging support
    DataQry = DataQry.Skip(TableIn.start);
    //need to handle "return all records" (-1)
    if (TableIn.length != -1)
    {
        DataQry = DataQry.Take(TableIn.length);
    }
    var QryResult = DataQry.ToList();
    return new DataTablesResult
    {
        //DONT MESS WITH THE DRAW PARAMETER
        draw = TableIn.draw,
        recordsTotal = DataQry.Count(),//dataset size before any searching/filtering
        recordsFiltered = recordsFiltered, //size after filtering, before paging.
        //pay close attention to the data structure. Json parser need an array without property names for each object. Make sure everything is ToStringed()
        data = QryResult.Select(x => new[] {x.field1 ,x.field2 }).ToList()
    };
}

Caveats

• Make sure to pass the Datatables object to MVC through a JSON string! This means overriding the default Ajax call done by datatables, see above.
• Be mindful of the return datastructure back to datatables. The data parameter of your DataTablesResult should be a a list of arrays, with each array element one of your table fields.