Cannot apply individual column searching with Chumper Datatables and Laravel - laravel-4

Question

I am stuck on the following,
I am using Chumper/datatable to display data from a MySQL database using PHP Laravel.
As descriped I have created two routes, One to deliver the view to the user, the other for datatable data:
Route::resource('users', 'UsersController');
Route::get('api/users', array('as'=>'api.users', 'uses'=>'UsersController#getDatatable'));
Then the controller
public function getDatatable()
{
return Datatable::collection(User::all(array('id','name', 'address')))
->showColumns('id', 'name', 'address')
->searchColumns('name')
->orderColumns('id','name')
->make();
}
and in blade page
#extends ('layouts.main')
#section('content')
<h2>Users</h2>
<div id="User">
{{ Datatable::table()
->addColumn('id', 'name', 'address')
->setUrl(route('api.users'))
->render()
}}
</div>
#stop
The problem is that I cannot find a way to apply the individual column searching (select inputs) and search in all 3 columns.
Thank you
/magefi

Answer 1

If i understand you correctly, You can pass multiple fields to searchColumns()
Controller:
->searchColumns(array('id:char:255', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'address', 'email', 'age:char:255'))
Package:
Line 237 of vendor/chumper/datatable/src/Chumper/Datatable/Engines/BaseEngine.php
237: public function searchColumns($cols)
238 {
239 if ( ! is_array($cols))
....
From README.md:
searchColumns(..$fields)
Will enable the table to allow search only in the given columns.
Please note that a collection behaves different to a builder object.
Note: If you want to search on number columns with the query engine,
then you can also pass a search column like this ```
//mysql
->searchColumns(array('id:char:255', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'address', 'email', 'age:char:255'))
//postgree
->searchColumns(array('id:text', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'address', 'email', 'age:text')) ```
This will cast the columns int the given types when searching on this
columns