Datatable hide and show rows based on a button click event

Yes, it is indeed possible, but you will need a different approach. Hiding rows with jQuery and not through dataTables itself is generally a bad idea, since dataTables is not aware of changes made to the original <table> element in DOM. There is no "somewhere-in-code-another-script-has-hidden-a-row"-event dataTables can hook into. That is why dataTables seems to "forget" changes, it is simply not aware of those changes, and the dataTables internals stay untouched.

So use a custom filter instead. The following small piece of code does what you want - hiding all rows having a data-user attribute different than 5. It works across sorting and pagination. The last piece of code is an example of a reset-button.

$("#hide").click(function() {    $.fn.dataTable.ext.search.push(       function(settings, data, dataIndex) {          return $(table.row(dataIndex).node()).attr('data-user') == 5;       }    );    table.draw();});    $("#reset").click(function() {    $.fn.dataTable.ext.search.pop();    table.draw();});

demo -> http://jsfiddle.net/d5hre2ux/

According to this https://datatables.net/examples/plug-ins/range_filtering.html it is possible to use data parameter to filter by any value shown on the table.

$("button").click(function() {    $.fn.dataTable.ext.search.push(      function(settings, data, dataIndex) {          return data[3] != "63";        }    );    table.draw();});