Just a short question: Is it possible, that wpDataTables allow outputting a Non-WP table to Wordpress REST_API?

If not: is this a feature already planned?

Thx

Andy

Hi Miljko,

thanks for the speedy reply. 

Quite some times I need to handle large(r) chunks of data from within my Database backend - I often use Wordpress as CMS to generate the website. But adding those large data-sets into the Wordpress database is in many cases not a good option (think about an external database - e.g. users, shops, addresses, weather-data - where the data is not necessarily related to the rest of the Wordpress content).

Managing this data in a single spot and in it's own table makes life of the content-manager much easier.

Now, when e.g creating a mobile app, we also want to make use of this data.

For now we must create our own code for that, which leaves us with 3 content-specific variations:

- WP database (handled by data-entry/manipulation in the WP backend)

- other-/external table management (e.g. phpMyAdmin or whatever)

- scripts to query those external tables (e.g. from the mobile app or a different website).

This is somewhat cumbersome...

Another option would be to extend the WP database scheme with custom post types, where we can use WP's REST-API to query the tables from WP's restful API.

This is a bit better than the solution mentioned above, but still quite some work and not really fast, if it comes to tables with lots of fields or records.

In an ideal WP-world, we would add wpDataTables to manage the additional/external table for editing, and front-end-viewing, but we could also query this data from an external site or app (much like the REST-API, but with all the nice relations kept intact).

This would make it much easier to handle the external table-data, since we can easily import/change/update the external datasets. This is especially true, if the datasets change often (e.g. weather-data, sports-data and whatnot)...

So preparing some views (or templates) in wpDataTables and allowing to query those sets from a remote site would generally solve a couple of additionally required steps (as it is now).

I hope this explains a bit better, what my question was referring to.

TIA & sorry for the lenghty reply

Andy