Datatables does not work inside namespaces or with pagenames with the term 'wiki' in them (includes suggested fix)

[johngnl]

In various implementations of DokuWiki I use this outstanding plugin. I recently discovered that the plugin didn't work in pages that I created inside a namespace called 'kesselwiki', while it worked well in other namespaces of the same DokuWiki instance.

Version info of this particular DokuWiki implementation datatables: 2023-08-31 dokuwiki: 2024-02-06a "Kaos" bootstrap3: v2024-02-06

After looking at the html source code of pages having an included, well designed datatable, I noticed that sometimes the required additional files like '.../datatables.net/js/jquery.dataTables.min.js' were not loaded. So, I decided to look at the source code.

I discovered that all pages that have an ID which includes the term 'wiki', and that contain a well formatted datatable are not rendered into a working datatable. The cause of this is this code in action.php

$excluded_pages = $this->getConf('excludedPages');

if (!empty($excluded_pages) && (bool)preg_match("/$excluded_pages/", $ID)) {
 return;
}

I had no value for 'excludedPages' in conf/local.php, so apparently the default value was in effect which was set in lib/plugins/datatables/conf/default.php. Since $conf['excludedPages'] has a default value of '(wiki)', all pages that have 'wiki' either in the namespace or name don't allow for a datatable as part of the content. And while the supposed datatable is just presented as a normal table the page rendered well, this was quite confusing at first. It took a while for me to realise that the table was well formed, so that the not-showing was not caused by the table data.

To fix the issue, I considered 3 options:

1. "Fix" the before mentioned if statement
2. Modify the value of 'excludedPages' through the configuration manager inside DokuWiki
3. "Fix" the default value

I decided to do the latter, because I suspect that the original idea was to exclude all pages that are placed inside the root namespace called 'wiki', part of all standard DokuWiki implementations. So in this particular implementation I changed $conf['excludedPages'] = '(wiki)'; to $conf['excludedPages'] = '(^wiki:)';

Since $ID always seems to include the complete namespace of path and pagename, only pages that reside inside the 'wiki' root namespace are excluded. (Only then _(bool)preg_match("/$excludedpages/", $ID)) is true.)

I suggest to include my slight modification of the default value, part of a following release of this plugin.