DataTables highlighting example

Preamble

The highlighting of rows and columns have be quite useful for attracting attention to where the user's cursor is in the data array. Of course the highlighting of a row is easy enough using CSS, but for column highlighting, you need to use a little bit of Javascript. This example shows that in action on a DataTables enhanced table - this type of effect would be particularly effective on tables with dense information.

Live example

Rendering engineBrowserPlatform(s)Engine versionCSS grade
Rendering engineBrowserPlatform(s)Engine versionCSS grade
Gecko Firefox 1.0 Win 98+ / OSX.2+ 1.7 A
Gecko Firefox 1.5 Win 98+ / OSX.2+ 1.8 A
Gecko Firefox 2.0 Win 98+ / OSX.2+ 1.8 A
Gecko Firefox 3.0 Win 2k+ / OSX.3+ 1.9 A
Gecko Camino 1.0 OSX.2+ 1.8 A
Gecko Camino 1.5 OSX.3+ 1.8 A
Gecko Netscape 7.2 Win 95+ / Mac OS 8.6-9.2 1.7 A
Gecko Netscape Browser 8 Win 98SE+ 1.7 A
Gecko Netscape Navigator 9 Win 98+ / OSX.2+ 1.8 A
Gecko Mozilla 1.0 Win 95+ / OSX.1+ 1 A
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Initialisation code

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$(document).ready(function() {
    var oTable = $('#example').dataTable( {
        "bSortClasses": false
    } );
     
    oTable.$('td').hover( function() {
        var iCol = $('td', this.parentNode).index(this) % 5;
        $('td:nth-child('+(iCol+1)+')', oTable.$('tr')).addClass( 'highlighted' );
    }, function() {
        oTable.$('td.highlighted').removeClass('highlighted');
    } );
} );

Other examples