ASP.NET GridView 'Page Not Found' on PostBack

Question

I have a GridView that (in one particular instance) would contain about 5000 rows, each row containing a DropDownList with about 5000 items. Naturally, this takes forever to load and throws and OutOfMemory exception on my box.

No big deal, I thought. I'll just enable paging.

Well, that works fine (for the same gridview) when its bound to other data, but when I bind it to this particular DataSource (the one with 5000 rows) problems arise.

When I first load the GridView with the offending DataSet, page one displays just fine. However, when I click to view page two I get the error:

Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): Unknown error.

In Google Chrome.

And the error:

Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage

In IE.

Any thoughts on why this is happening would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Look in the event viewer where IIS is running and you'll see any unhandled ASP.NET errors.

Also a drop down with 5000+ entries doesn't seem like an optimal choice for a control...

Answer 2

Instead of retrieving the 5000 rows just retrieve the ones you will show on the page.

Also a drop down with 5000+ entries doesn't seem like an optimal choice for a control...

+1

Answer 3

This is probably just a timeout issue. It's taking much longer on postback because it has to process the ViewState... which will be absolutely huge.

Like others have said, your implementation needs a re-think.

Are these options organized alphabetically? If so, what about a fairly straightforward autocomplete? Type two letters and then get a popup of available options that start with those two letters. The Yahoo library has a decent implementation of this.

If you absolutely positively have to have 5000 options in a dropdown... move this dropdown outside the GridView so that it doesn't appear on every row. Basically, the user will select a row, and then use this single "master" dropdown to select the data. You could probably even throw in a javascript hack that moved the dropdown into the row on selection so that it appears the dropdown is in every row, but there is really only one.