Why are beta examples in XML instead of HTML?

clairestreb

Hi, I just downloaded TableTools-master.zip from github, and the examples are in XML instead of HTML. Can you please explain why and how you are expecting us to open them? Thanks.

tangerine

I can't answer your questions, but if you download from here
http://datatables.net/extras/
the issue goes away.

clairestreb

@tangerine, right - the link you provided is for the officially released version. This question pertains to the beta version, which is the latest master and not yet released.

tangerine

Ah, ok - sorry.

allan

Github contains the source files, not the built examples (or any other generated / built code, with one or two exceptions). The examples have been rewritten as part of my work on DataTables 1.10 to be XML / Markdown based, which allows the raw example file size to be ~25 lines of code, compared to the ~700 lines of code for every example that used to be required.

This makes the examples massively more maintainable, as well as more cohesive. Personally I never enjoyed writing the examples before - now I do, and I'm not afraid of altering one or two little things about the page layout, tweaking the data or adding / removing an example.

You are absolutely correct that I should build instructions on how to create a the examples from source (its almost as trivial as most other software that needs to be installed from source). I'll add this to the documentation and readies soon, but in summary:

You need a unix / linux environment with bash and php 5.3 or newer available. Clone / download the DataTablesSrc repo and then clone / download any of the extensions that you want into an `extensions` directory.

Then on your terminal `cd` into DataTablesSrc/build and type `./make.sh build debug` . That will make DataTables in the DataTablesSrc/built directory. Use `./make.sh extension TableTools debug` to build TableTools.

There are some options such as the path to closure compiler that may need to be altered for your system as well, but that's how to build DataTables and the extensions. As I say, I'll write this up properly soon.

Allan

Ps. The link to the released version from tangerine was built from the source repo.

clairestreb

@allan, Thanks for clearing things up. This can be closed now.
@tangerine, My apologies, you were right after all, since Allan has explained github's xml files are sources that get built as html in the release.