AjaxLine

Matthew Russel published the next article from his series about Dojo Javascript library. In this article he tells about handling very large datasets and shoind the data in grids. He writes the following:

«It’s a given that you can use the grid to display relatively small data sets effectively in the browser and get the niceties of sorting, column resizing, etc. that come along with it. That’s cool and all, but there’s a practical limit to the number of records you can deal with at any given time, which eventually leads to the concept of paginating results.

Well, go ahead and forget about pagination; those days are finally over. Dojo’s grid works by lazy loading data as the grid scrolls. For a relatively small data set consisting of hundreds of records, lazy loading amounts to building out the DOM for a pre-loaded data set when you scroll. For example, if you had 100 records but could only view 20 of them at a time, you wouldn’t want to build the nodes for any of the records in 21 through 100 until you scrolled to that particular section. Sorting by a column and related tasks work in memory as expected for small data sets since you can effectively get things done in JavaScript. »

Source: ONLamp.