Dynamic filtering, am I doing it wrong?

Question

Hi,

So I have an umbraco site with a number of products in it that is content managed, I need to search/filter this dataset on the front end based on 5 criteria.

I'd estimate I will have 300 products. I need to filter this data very fast and hide show options that are no longer relevant based on the previous selections.

I'm currently building a webservice and jquery implementation using AJAX.

Is the best way to do this to load it into a javascript data structure and operate on it there or will AJAX calls be fast enough? Obviously this will mean duplicating the functionality on the server side for non-javascript users.

Answer 1

If you need to filter the data "very fast" then I imagine the best way is to preload all the data then manipulate it client side. If you're waiting for an Ajax response every time the user needs to filter the data then it's not going to be as fast as filtering it on the client (assuming they haven't got an ancient computer running IE6).

It would depend on the complexity of your filtering. If all your doing is showing results where, for example, the product's price is greater than $10, then that will definitely be much faster. If you're going to be doing complex searches then it's possible that it could be faster to process serverside. The other question is how much data is saved for each product - preloading a few hundred products with a lot of data may take some time.

As always, the only way you'll truly be able to answer this question is by profiling the two solutions.