Question

I have this GUI that shows, let’s say Customer Orders. When my client nailed down the requirements, he asked me to keep pagination like this,

Show Items Per Page : 10/50/150

For each customer there could be thousands of orders and each order will have atleast 50 attributes to show up in the screen. So, assume a 50 column html table with 2000 or 3000 records associated with it spanning across multiple database tables (anyway, this is a different story)

Things were breeze until yesterday, now my client has come up with new change requests, in that he specified Show Items like this,

Show Items Per Page : 10/50/150/All

Yes, he wanted to see 2000 or 3000 records by just select “All” option. Internally, this is not a big change, I would go back and remove the filters I apply on rowcount etc., but when it is loaded in GUI it really sucks … view state was huge etc., etc.,

I know, this is a standard problem. How you guys deal with it? I cannot convince my client to remove this “All” option, he got stick to it. (the reason is simple, he got a big 42″ screen where he can easily see 1000 items in one page)

I also tried to use javacript to prepare DOM in a ajax call .. but still, inserting 2000 TDs is really slow.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Some Extra Info

1. This application is a intranet application or else accessed through VPN connection

Answer 1

This problem is about browser performance.
I suppose you can do two things.
1) you can use <div> instead of <table> (this is possible with CSS) because browser do not render table until closed tag. So it will take long to load page but it will render first results faster.
2) If you use Ajax+Json and render every <tr> piece by piece, you can render whole thing and only than put it in DOM. That will be faster because browser will not render every time you put another row