GridView : Paging vs VerticalScrollBar

Question

case of paging : cross-browser, easy to use, native. troubles of paging : slow and not so good for user.

case of scrollbar : fast, and good for user. troubles of scrollbar : Hard to make it works correct :-/ , FF and IE7 only

I'm new as asp.net developer so I need to chose some way to make this Data grid very friendly for user and without big troubles for myself. Looking like that's not easy. So I want to know some skills and tricks about it.

I'm thinking of making ScrollBar for FF and Paging for other browsers, but that's ... weird ... ?

Thank you and sorry for my English if I fail somewhere with it >_<

Answer 1

I am a big fan of giving the user the ability to filter their data and work with a reduced set of it, and then educating them to use the app that way. There are very few cases where the user really needs to have 100s of records on the page. My preference is to limit them to 50 or 100 rows, and then page the rest. Once you have too many records on the aspx page, your page performance dives, it takes longer to generate, longer to deliver, and longer to render client side.

Maybe it is time for you to invest in a third party grid? Grid components that implement paging will normally do the page action as a callback, so you are only re-rendering part of the aspx page when changing pages, so it can be reasonably quick to do. Most third party grids also give you access to the paging mechanism, so you can either control how big each grid page is, or allow the user to select how big they want it.