Ajax based Dashboard On LargeData (Asp.net)

Question

hello guys

iam working on some sort of crm application which has huge sales data with all the customer leads etc (ASP.net 2.0/AJAx)

i want to create a dashboard which will have four separate data containers each container will have different sort of data and each container has to update it self after some configred time interval . so i want to update only that part of page not whole page

what should i used in the above senario asp.net updatePanel or Jquery implemention (which technique and why)

bcoz performance is also question

Regards Adeel

Answer 1

Both ASP.NET UpdatePanel or jQuery (or a mix of both) would serve you fine on this scenario; if you don't have experience with neither, I would recommend the UpdatePanel way because it is closer to the regular ASP.NET code you're used to.

This article will get you 90% there, all you have to do at the end is to put some simple javascript in place to fire the updates every X seconds; something like window.setTimeout("Button1.click()",5000) if you want to refresh a panel every 5 seconds. If you don't want the button to be available for the users, just make it hidden via CSS.

There are more elegant approaches (using JSON, webservices, client-side templating etc) but that's an easy way to get the job done.

Answer 2

ASP.NET UpdatePanel is easy to set up, but in my experience terrible to debug.

Doing it yourself with jQuery (or some other JS framework) and an .NET AJAX library is more work upfront, but much easier to improve and maintain later.

UpdatePanel's traffic is a lot bigger than the JSON you'd use with your own solution, if that's a concern.

Answer 3

Also you can use dynamic dashboard framework and convert update panels to drag-drop widgets.

It's a browser independent web part framework for Asp.Net.