Documentation hopes
Documentation hopes
One major time sink for me has been generating the server-side data needed by Editor.
The documentation seems to assume that everyone is using the PHP editor classes. PHP is hardly the only popular web language, and is not often used within corporations as often as, say, .NET or Java.
No one can expect support classes to be provided for every common language, but it sure would be nice if I didn't have to reverse-engineer the data being sent to the editor after finding the URI in the demo source code and translating it to an absolute URI that I can use to see the JSON output.
Current demos all have a "Submitted data:" and "Server response:" section. Why not a "Initial data used to actually populate the table" section?
The documentation seems to assume that everyone is using the PHP editor classes. PHP is hardly the only popular web language, and is not often used within corporations as often as, say, .NET or Java.
No one can expect support classes to be provided for every common language, but it sure would be nice if I didn't have to reverse-engineer the data being sent to the editor after finding the URI in the demo source code and translating it to an absolute URI that I can use to see the JSON output.
Current demos all have a "Submitted data:" and "Server response:" section. Why not a "Initial data used to actually populate the table" section?
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Replies
The documentation for the Editor classes currently focus on PHP as we only have one server-side implementation for Editor in the package at the moment - basically it comes down to the fact that we had to start somewhere, and that was it! The next major version of Editor will include a server-side implementation in C# suitable for use in the .NET environment, at which point documentation will be introduced for that platform as well.
The data format that is used to communicate between the client and server for Editor is documented here: http://editor.datatables.net/server/ . The one thing it doesn't do is documentation how to get data into the table - to some extent it assumes that you've already read through posts such as this one: http://datatables.net/blog/Getting_started_with_DataTables%3A_First_steps .
However, that obviously isn't clear enough, so I will be looking at making sure that the documentation does cover that first set more clearly. Thanks for bringing this up!
*edit* Based on your other thread I see specifically what you are looking for now. So I think that two new sections should be introduced to the examples: 1. the return from the server for initial load, 2. the server-side code used. The reason they aren't there at the moment is that this would be a huge amount of information in the demos, but what I'm going to do is use tabs (or similar) to add this in, as I completely agree, this will make things easier.
Regards,
Allan