It is possible to easily customise the options shown in the length menu using the lengthMenu initialisation option. This parameter can take one of two forms: 1) A 1D array of options which will be used for both the displayed option and the value; 2) A 2D array in which the first array is used to define the value options and the second array the displayed options. The example below shows a 2D array being used to include a "Show all" records option.

Each HTML control element presented by DataTables is denoted by a single character in the dom option. For example the l option is used for the Length changing input option. In this example default DOM positions are mixed by adding correction classes to the parent container: .length-left to show length on the left side, .filter-right to show filter on the right etc.

Highlighting rows and columns have be quite useful for drawing attention to where the user's cursor is in a table, particularly if you have a lot of narrow columns. Of course the highlighting of a row is easy enough using CSS, but for column highlighting, you need to use a little bit of Javascript. This example shows that in action on DataTable by making use of the cell().index(), cells().nodes() and column().nodes() methods.

Each column has an optional rendering control called columns.render which can be used to process the content of each cell before the data is used. This example shows the person's age combined with their name in the first column, hiding the age column. This technique can be useful for adding links, assigning colours based on content rules and any other form of text manipulation you require. Note: hidden column needs .never class to exclude it from the child row.