Help:Datatables format/Development notes

With regard of the general design, SRF's Datatables (v2) uses the Datatables's Server side (Ajax api) in its own way and tries to offer some enhancements. Precisely, it includes a kind of middleware inside the api's callback in order to retrieve, both at the initial load of the page, and for each api call, more data than those required to render the single requested page. This way, much less api calls are necessary and several pages (controlled by the defer-each parameter) also containing hundreds of rows, can be retrieved at once, allowing a smoother navigation.