jQuery DataTable plugin-Change the headers while exporting as excel

Exporting as excel in a DataTable configured table is pretty straight forward. But what if we want to change the header while exporting as excel so that the web view has a different header and the excel has a different one.

But why would anyone need to do that?

The Problem...

Well lets take the example from this previous post where the table has a <select> filter in the header instead of a column name.

Exporting this datatable as an excel file will generate something like this:

As you can see, the options in the filter dropdown become the header text in the excel.

The Solution...

We definitely need a better column name as the header in the excel file so lets try to do that. To achieve this, we need to add the below code to the initialization object.

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...
"buttons": [{
  "extend": 'excel',
  "exportOptions": {
    "format": {
      "header": function(content, index) {
        // Here 2 is the index of the column 
        // whose header name we want to change(0 based)
        return index === 2 ? "Gender" : content;
      }
    }
  }
}]
...

Here is a jsfiddle with a full working example.

After adding the above code, we get the desired header text in the column.