Add feature to datatable? - php

Question

Hey guys i was just playing around with datatables, i was wondering if anyone new of a possible way to do the following:
When you have a TD for Description, if the description is lengthy is there a way to add like a read more link or a ... instead of warping the row height?
Any resources you have on this would be useful!
Here is my current setup:
require_once('db_config.php');
$sql = "SELECT * FROM routes";
$stmt = $conn->prepare($sql);
$stmt->execute();
echo '<table class="table table-striped table-bordered" id="basic-datatable" border="0" cellpadding="10">';
echo '<thead><tr><th>Business ID</th><th>Business Type</th><th>Price</th><th>Down Payment</th><th>Weekly Net</th><th>City</th><th>State</th><th>Business Description</th></tr></thead>';
echo '<tbody>';
while ($row = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC))
{
echo "<tr>";
echo '<td>' . $row['route_id'] . '</td>';
echo '<td>' . $row['route_title'] . '</td>';
echo '<td>$' . $row['total_price'] . '</td>';
echo '<td>$' . $row['down_payment'] . '</td>';
echo '<td>$' . $row['weekly_net'] . '</td>';
echo '<td>' . $row['city'] . '</td>';
echo '<td>' . $row['state'] . '</td>';
echo '<td>' . $row['remarks'] . '</td>';
echo "</tr>";
}
echo '</tbody>';
echo '</table>';
Thanks

Answer 1

There are two ways to go about this kind of behavior.
One is CSS using text-overflow: ellipsis;, though that only handles the ellipsis part. (Since you want more than just that, I won't go into the details here, but here are the MDN docs for that, in case you're interested.)
The way to do it in PHP is to determine how many characters fit into your table cell, including "Read More," and truncating the string accordingly.
So, if $row['remarks'] is the field you want to handle, you might do something like:
while ($row = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC))
{
if(strlen($row['remarks']) >= 50) {
$row['remarks'] = substr($row['remarks'],50) . "... Read More";
}
echo '<tr>'...
}