Hello George

Thank you for your purchase

To create MySQL-based editable tables, the algorithm is a little more complicated.

First, you will need to create a table on the MySQL side, and a MySQL-query based wpDataTable; the steps for this are described in this tutorial.

Once the table is created, go to the “Editing” tab in table configuration settings and click the “Allow editing” button like from the example above.
The wpDataTables plugin will then try to guess the  “MySQL table name for editing” and the “ID column for editing”  (if the column name is “id” or “ID” or similar, it will usually guess correctly).

In some cases, it is necessary to provide the name for “MySQL table name for editing” and the “ID column for editing” for two reasons: First, it is not always possible to parse it from the query; and second – there are situations when you would like to send the changes to a different table rather from than the one used in the query. After you define these settings don’t forget to press the “Apply” button.

The ID column is very important, because if you don't use an Auto-Increment Unique column, you may experience issues like this.

On the other hand, if you use a column with non-unique values as an ID column, it might happen that when you save the settings on the front-end, not only one column, but multiple columns will be edited. It therefore makes sense to make the ID columns invisible (uncheck the “Visible” checkbox for this column) so as not to confuse the users, since IDs are usually not human-readable.

Also, please note that only one MySQL table can be edited at a time. Queries from multiple tables with joins cannot be used as an editable feature, since SQL UPDATE and INSERT statements are generated automatically, and there currently is no way to update multiple tables

Hi again George

Since you don't see the red and green buttons (remove and add new column), it simply means you have an SQL query based table, where you can't add or remove columns.

You can only add the formula columns (the long blue button).

The issue with SQL Query based tables is probably in the "ID column for editing" you configured in the "Editing" tab above the table. That column needs to be a primary auto-increment column in the database, otherwise issues like this can occur.

If you still can't get it to work, please provide me:

• A temporary WP-admin login for your site where this happens
• Database access (PHPMyAdmin or cPanel)

So we could log in and take a look ‘from the inside’ as that’s the most efficient way to see and resolve the issue. We do not interfere with any data or anything else except for the plugin (in case that’s a production version of the site), and of course we do not provide login data to third party. 

You can write credentials here just check Private Reply so nobody can see them except us.

Hello again George

If you've created a table from a database table, and that wpDataTable is editable - the underlying database table has to save those changes as well. Simply because wpDataTables is pulling the data from the database, and it can't store the edited data anywhere else other than the table it was created from.

Please provide me:

• A temporary WP-admin login for your site where this happens
• Database access (PHPMyAdmin or cPanel)

So we could log in and take a look ‘from the inside’ as that’s the most efficient way to see and resolve the issue. We do not interfere with any data or anything else except for the plugin (in case that’s a production version of the site), and of course we do not provide login data to third party. 

You can write credentials here just check Private Reply so nobody can see them except us.

Thank you, George

I'm glad to hear everything is working as it should.

If you have any further questions or issues, please feel free to open a new ticket, and we'll gladly help.