Jquery Datatables column rendering and sorting

I think I got it. I just had to tell the render function to only operate on "display" types:

{        "data":"created_at",        "name":"date",        "visible":true,        "title":"Date Created",        "render": function(data, type, full, meta){                if(type == "display"){                        var date = new Date(data);                        var options = {year: "numeric", month: "long", day: "numeric"};                        return date.toLocaleDateString('en-US', options);                }                return data;        }},

Well if it is a server-side datatable, what you can do is edit a json just before it is passedlike in the beginning of ssp.class.php in the new datatables (tell me if you are using the old one)
NOTE: in the new datatables, it is an inbuilt function called formatter that does the same but you can use custom function like this

if ($j == 6) {  if ($data[$i][$columns[$j]['db']] == 1) {      $data[$i][$columns[$j]['db']] = '<label class="btn-danger disabled btn">Stopped</label>';  } else {      $data[$i][$columns[$j]['db']] = '<label class="btn-success disabled btn">Running</label>';  }

here i am simply editing a 0 and 1 in my db to a Label Stopped and Running
you can do something like parse_date and store a reformatted one