I have an Datatable with some data and I want to display a string, which works, but I want to order it by another column which is a number and it is not working. I have done that by assigning the column:

'data-order' => 'column_name_to_be_sorted'

It does not throw any error in console, and it only changes the arrow icon and not changing column order in anyway.

I cannot show you the querry but you can see here i add the columnMeta to all numbers type:"num-fmt", becouse it cannot be ordered correct if I change to "number":

->pipe(
                 new ColumnMeta(
                    array(
                        "nmb_rooms"            => array(
                            "label" => "Nr. of Rooms",
                            "type"  => "num-fmt",
                        ),
                        "cc"                   => array(
                            "type" => "num-fmt",
                        ),
                        "time_spent"           => array(
                            "type" => "num-fmt",
                        ),
                        "diff"                 => array(
                            "type" => "num-fmt",
                        ),
                        "cc_formatted"         => array(
                            "label" => "Expected time spent",
                            "type"  => "string",
                        ),
                        "time_spent_formatted" => array(
                            "label" => "Actual time spent",
                            "type"  => "string",
                        ),
                        "diff_formatted"       => array(
                            "label" => "Time difference",
                            "type"  => "string",
                        ),
                    )
                )
            )

and here I create the Datatable inside a view

<?php
                DataTables::create(
                    array(
                        "dataSource" => $this->dataStore("demo"),
                        "options"    => array(
                            "searching" => true,
                        ),
                        "columns"    => array(
                            "nmb_rooms",
                            "cc_formatted"         => array(
                                'data-order' => 'cc',
                            ),
                            "time_spent_formatted" => array(
                                'data-order' => 'time_spent',
                            ),
                            "diff_formatted"       => array(
                                'data-order' => 'diff',
                            ),
                        ),
                    ),
) ?>

"cc, time_spent, diff" is a number of total seconds between 2 dates and "diff_formatted, ..." are calculated columns which display the duration in hours and minutes as a string

Added the columns, now on arrow click data changes, but not in asc or desc manner..I did not hide the columns by which it should be ordered and I can see that now it is ordering randomly.

here are the pics of when i format the colun directly, and if I format the column with the property data-order

 "time_spent" => array(
                                'visible' => true,
                            ),
                            "time_spent_formatted" => array(
                                'data-order' => 'time_spent',
                                'label' => "time_spent_formatted"
                            ),

It works thank you, but why did we need to put the type inside this one, if it is used as string and we have "time_spent" as "num-fmt"...anyhow please update the docs...there is no indication that we need to display columns and hide them, if we want to use this feature and no indication that we need to put the type to "num-fmt", it is really frustrating that it is not documented properly.