The datatables plugin is one of the coolest jQuery plugins around, and I wanted to find a way to make it work easily with ASP.NET MVC sites. Initially I created some objects that included the various datatables property names and that worked well. However, when another project came along and I wanted to use datatables in that project too I realized the original way I created the objects just wasn’t going to cut it.

After a lot of searching I found this blog post. I liked what I saw. Even better was the additional code contributed by Paul Inglis in the comments. The only thing I did not like was the stringify used to turn the datatables JSON into key/value pairs. I also did not like the way the project was made available – a box.net download location with no way to contribute (hence the code in the comments). I decided I would build on these great contributions and update the code to work without the serialization.

So, here it is on GitHub. The code has been cleaned up, it uses Paul’s Expression code for building the filters/sorts, and it doesn’t stringify the datatables data which cuts the data sent pretty much in half. I also added a model binder so it all “just works”.

NOTE: Isn’t it funny how one can look for something and not see it right in front of them? When I was doing my original googling, I was getting next to nothing for results. It is funny how that can work out sometimes. I built upon the above codebase and pushed my code to GitHub and nuget because I thought I was providing something of value. It wasn’t until I searched for my nuget package that I saw about a dozen other packages doing similar things. That being said, there are only a couple that include everything I did – others are just models or binders, so it is somewhat of use. Also, I see in the most used package a minor flaw in logic in the binder, but it doesn’t break any functionality, so not a big deal. Finally, the process gave me a chance to do a deep-dive into Expressions, and that was very enlightening, so the entire process was still of use, even if the nuget package isn’t. 🙂