Searching, sorting and paginating large datasets on the client

Question

Hi,

I have been using the DataTables plugin for jQuery (http://www.datatables.net) to search, sort and paginate tabular data on the client. The simplicity of implementation and smooth user experience have been a huge win.

Now I have a requirement to implement the same functionality (search, sort, paginate) over a larger set of data, max 1000 records. I was hoping to use the same plug-in for this, but it seems that the performance of DataTables degrades steeply when the number of records in the table increases. On IE8, a table of 500 trs already causes the "A script on this page is running slow" alert.

Because the datasets are not that huge, I would very much like to do this on the client if possible.

Is there any way to improve the performance of DataTables plugin by changing the rendered markup, disabling some features, feeding the data as JSON instead of HTML or otherwise configuring it to achieve sensible performance for 1000 client-side records on most modern browsers (IE7+, FF2+, Chrome).

Alternatively, are there any other javascript libraries, preferably jQuery, which could offer similar functionality?

Answer 1

I am more fond of flexigrid:

http://www.flexigrid.info/

The number of records is not a problem, because it is implemented every page. So we are not managing 1000 records at a time.

Answer 2

After some further performance testing, it turns out that sorting is causing the performance issue. jQuery DataTables is more than able to paginate and search over tables of up to 3000 records on IE6, and far far more on last-gen browsers.

All you have to do is to initialize DataTables with "bSort":false and it'll take it like a champ.