jQuery TableSorter Plugin error on init : cannot read property '0' of undefined

Question

i wanna sort my table with jQuery Plugin TableSorter . So i get this table :

<table id="stats" class="zebra-striped">
 <thead>
  <tr>
   <th>Date</th>
   <th>Annonce</th>
   <th>Support</th>
   <th>Nb Assoc.</th>
   <th>Nb Transfo.</th>
   <th>Cout</th>
  </tr>
 </thead>
 <tbody>
 </tbody>
</table>

So as you can see my table is empty, just had header. So i init tablesorter with empty cell with :

$("table#stats").tablesorter({ sortList: [[0,0]]});

and immediatly i get this error :

jquery.tablesorter.min.js:4 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property '0' of undefined

FYI , there's my js loaded :

<!-- Grab Google CDN's jQuery, with a protocol relative URL; fall back to local if necessary -->
<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.js"></script>
<script>window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="js/libs/jquery-1.5.1.min.js">\x3C/script>')</script>
<script src="js/bootstrap-dropdown.js"></script>
<script src="js/bootstrap-scrollspy.js"></script>
<script src="js/jquery.tablesorter.min.js"></script>

Any idea why i get this and how i can make the plugin work again ?

Thx

Answer 1

You need to have data in your table before you can call the sortList method on it. This is because you apply an indexing in this method that will not find any records if there is no data present and that will throw the "Cannot read property '0' of undefined" error.

Answer 2

It's not good use tablesorter when there is a empty table, so you can use this condition:

if ($("table#stats tbody tr").length > 0)
   $(this).tablesorter({ sortList: [[0,0]]});

Answer 3

You don't need to have data in your table. Just initilize your table that way:

$("table#stats").tablesorter();

Then, after you have inserted the data in the table, you must tell to plugin that the table was updated and sort it:

$("table#stats").trigger("update");
var sorting = [[0,0]];
$("table#stats").trigger("sorton",[sorting]);

Answer 4

I couldn't get any of this to work so I set a timeout on the initialize for tablesorter...

setTimeout(function() {$('table').tablesorter();}, 10000);

Answer 5

I've noticed that this happens with the latest version (2.0.5b, I think) found at http://tablesorter.com/, but it didn't happen in earlier versions (I have a copy of 2.0.3, and it worked in that). However, there is a forked version at https://github.com/Mottie/tablesorter, which is much better maintained, and doesn't have this error.

Answer 6

I got an error "cannot read property 'format' of undefined". In my case the error occurred due to different number of 'td's in 'tbody' than in 'thead'