Question

We have a gridview with quite a large amount of information (100s or rows and columns) which we need to improve preformance of.

Currently to fix some performance issues we have made the gridview have no edittemplate and instead double clicking on a cell will bring up a dropdown of the available options that is retrieved using webmethods and populated using jquery dynamically, after an option is choosen in the dropdown we set teh value in the html to the value of the selected option.

We are having problems subsequently sending this changes back to the server, we have a button on the page that causes a postback to the server but the changes that we have made via the jquery functionality aren’t available when we loop through the gridview items they still have the same values as previous.

Are we going about this the wrong way in terms of populating/updating how can we achieve this?

Aside: I know we should probably limit the bounds of the grid but at the moment this is not an option

Answer 1

When you work with GridView natively, that is, you let it handle the edit template, ViewState gets into the scene and works just fine. But when you manipulate grid manually, no change is reflected in related places, thus having the same values at server. You said that you fetch values on dblclick via jQuery. Why don’t you update the row on blur? I mean, when user goes to the next row, simply update the current record via Ajax. That’s the most safe approach.
Once I had the same experience with Telerik’s RadTree. You should:

1. Use client-side API provided for your controls, or
2. Don’t mess with native way your control works, while expecting PostBacks to work, or
3. Use controls just for display purposes, but for manipulation, use AJAX.