In my previous post about sorting data I explained the brilliance of client side sorting using jQuery. When researching various other jQuery plugins I discovered tablesearch which can be invaluable when searching smaller data sets.

As in my previous jQuery post we will start with a standard HTML table, giving it an id of “myTable” of course if you wish to use multiple instances on the same page a class is a far more elegant solution.

Creating a tablesearch is as easy as:

$('#myTable').tableSearch();

The tableSearch plugin has a small error handling facility in that one can set default messages to display when no searching data is found or when a field is empty.

$('#myTable').tableSearch({
    empty: "This is an empty field error message",
    notFound: "This is a not found error message"
});

As with the tablesorter plugin, any column can be removed from the search using the tableSearch config.

$('myTable').tableSearch({
     ignore: "myColumnName"
});

There will be more functionality built in in future releases such as turbo and selector. I would recommend tablesearch to anyone thinking of searching small data structures

For release documentation and downloads visit the plugin website