django-rest-framework-datatables

Overview

This package provides seamless integration between Django REST framework and Datatables.

Install django-rest-framework-datatables, call your API with ?format=datatables and it will return a JSON structure that is fully compatible with what Datatables expects. It handles searching, filtering, ordering and most usecases you can imagine with Datatables.

The great benefit of django-rest-framework-datatables is that you don't have to create a different API, your API still work exactly the same unless you specify the datatables format on your request.

Full documentation is available on Read the Docs !

You can play with a demo of the example app on Python Anywhere.

Requirements

• Python (3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.14)
• Django (3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.0, 6.1)
• Django REST Framework (3.14 and later)

We highly recommend and only officially support the latest patch release of each Python, Django and Django Rest Framework series.

The test suite runs on every pull request and every push to master, against each Python version that each of those Django releases supports, with the newest Django REST Framework and django-filter releases that support that Django, and once more with the oldest supported releases of both on Django 3.2. A scheduled workflow also runs it against Django's main branch.

Quickstart

Installation

Just use pip:

$ pip install djangorestframework-datatables

Configuration

To enable Datatables support in your project, add 'rest_framework_datatables' to your INSTALLED_APPS, and modify your REST_FRAMEWORK settings like this:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.renderers.JSONRenderer',
        'rest_framework.renderers.BrowsableAPIRenderer',
        'rest_framework_datatables.renderers.DatatablesRenderer',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_FILTER_BACKENDS': (
        'rest_framework_datatables.filters.DatatablesFilterBackend',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_PAGINATION_CLASS': 'rest_framework_datatables.pagination.DatatablesPageNumberPagination',
    'PAGE_SIZE': 50,
}

And that's it !

Your API is now fully compatible with Datatables and will provide searching, filtering, ordering and pagination without any modification of your API code !

Always Serialize Specific Fields

Sometimes you may want to expose fields regardless of datatable's url parameters. You can do so by setting the datatables_always_serialize tuple like so:

class ArtistSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    id = serializers.IntegerField(read_only=True)

    class Meta:
        model = Artist
        fields = (
            'id', 'name',
        )
        datatables_always_serialize = ('id',)

An example of Datatable

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>Rolling Stone Top 500 albums of all time</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/twitter-bootstrap/4.0.0/css/bootstrap.css">
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="//cdn.datatables.net/1.10.16/css/dataTables.bootstrap4.min.css">
</head>

<body>
  <div class="container">
    <div class="row">
      <div class="col-sm-12">
        <table id="albums" class="table table-striped table-bordered" style="width:100%">
          <thead>
            <tr>
              <th>Rank</th>
              <th>Artist</th>
              <th>Album name</th>
              <th>Year</th>
              <th>Genres</th>
            </tr>
          </thead>
        </table>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
  <script src="//code.jquery.com/jquery-1.12.4.js"></script>
  <script src="//cdn.datatables.net/1.10.16/js/jquery.dataTables.min.js"></script>
  <script src="//cdn.datatables.net/1.10.16/js/dataTables.bootstrap4.min.js"></script>
  <script>
      $(document).ready(function() {
          var table = $('#albums').DataTable({
              "serverSide": true,
              "ajax": "/api/albums/?format=datatables",
              "columns": [
                  {"data": "rank", "searchable": false},
                  {"data": "artist_name", "name": "artist.name"},
                  {"data": "name"},
                  {"data": "year"},
                  {"data": "genres", "name": "genres.name", "sortable": false},
              ]
          });
      });
  </script>
</body>
</html>

Example project

To play with the example project, just clone the repository and run the dev server.

$ git clone https://github.com/izimobil/django-rest-framework-datatables.git
$ cd django-rest-framework-datatables
$ pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
$ python example/manage.py runserver
$ firefox http://127.0.0.1:8000

Testing

Install development requirements.

$ pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Run the tests.

$ python example/manage.py test

You can also use the excellent tox testing tool to run the tests against all supported versions of Python and Django. Install tox globally, and then simply run:

$ tox

If you want to check the coverage, use:

$ coverage run ./example/manage.py test
$ coverage report -m

Documentation

The documentation is available online on Read the Docs.

To build the documentation, you’ll need to install sphinx.

$ pip install -r requirements-docs.txt

To build the documentation:

$ cd docs
$ make clean && make html