Background
I have an ASP.net MVC 4 web application written in VB and Razor, and using MySQL as its data source.
I need a view to display a table containing an ever expanding amount of data. (Potentially up to 10’s of thousands of rows and maybe more.)
In order for me to continue further development, I have temporarily implemented a basic data-table where all rows are written to the page and then handled by the data-table thereafter. This works fine with up to a few hundred rows, but the more rows there are, the slower it gets and page loading times plummet!
Question
How do I implement the data table in such a way that data is retrieved and displayed only when needed so as to keep consistent page loading times, but also keep the searching and sorting functionality?
Additional notes
My guess is that the data-table must call something server side to pass only the required data, but I have no idea where to begin with this.
The solution I found to this was to use an Ajax source for the data table. I added a get method to my controller and return the required datatable JSON array to populate the datatable.
Here is the website I found which provided the solution:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/177335/Refreshing-content-of-the-table-using-AJAX-in-ASP