Silverlight - Unable to load a lot of data

Question

Hello,

I have a Silverlight application that has a DataGrid and a DataPager. The data source for these controls comes from a database. I am accessing this database through RIA Services.

When I try to load all of the records, I receive an error that says: "Load operation failed for query 'GetData'. The server did not provide a meaningful reply; this might be caused by a contract mismatch, a premature session shutdown or an internal server error."

By gradually restricting the size of the result set on the server side, I have come to the conclusion that I am getting this error because my data set is too large. My question is, how do I elegantly load large data sets into a DataGrid? I am open to approaches outside of RIA Services.

Thank you!

Answer 1

First off, if you have the means and aren't required to write this code yourself, consider buying a UI component that solves you problem (of find an open source solution). For these types of tasks, there's a good chance that someone else has put a lot of effort into solving problems like this one. For reference, there's a teleric grid control for Silverlight with some demos.

If you can't buy a component, here's some approaches I've seen:

• Set up a paging system where the data for the current page is loaded, and new data isn't loaded until the pages are switched. You could probably cache previous results to make this work more smoothly.
• Load data when needed, so when the user scrolls down/sideways, data is loaded once cells are reached that haven't had data loaded.

One last idea that comes to mind is to gzip the data on the server before sending. If your bottleneck is transmission time, compression speed things up for the type of data you're working with.