Windows Forms Control - Huge list of filenames

Question

Which control would be best for showing a huge (300.000+) list of filenames?

I've tried DataGridView, but it seems to be overkill and also slow.

Are there better alternatives?

Answer 1

Set up pagination and restrict the number of rows displayed by the DataGrid. You can add a combobox to jump between pages. This is a standard solution.

also see this post http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2125963/need-help-in-gridview-and-table

Answer 2

Have you tried the ListView with report style? This is the control used by Windows natively in its file browsers.

Answer 3

Following on from gotch4's answer. Here is a good article from CodeProject on how to do paging with a DataGridView.

Answer 4

None.

No USER will be able to handle a single list of 300.000+ entries in a meaningful way. Looks like your design is seriously flawed - do you really have to present the complete list?

Consider using a search box and let the users search the file names (use auto completion/suggestions like Google et.al.) or create a separate list for every starting letter (like most address books do). Or find another way to reduce the number of entries from which the user has to select.

Answer 5

Take a look at SourceGrid I have used it and are very pleased with it. It's very good with large amounts of data.

Quote from documentation:
High-performance DataGrid. A grid with 100k rows or more is a standard, not an exception. Performance tuning is one of the core focuses

Answer 6

You might want to check out ObjectListView, specifically the VirtualObjectListView:

http://objectlistview.sourceforge.net/cs/index.html

I forget off hand what license it has been released under so you might want to look at that before using it in a commercial application.

Answer 7

The standard ListView control has a virtual mode designed specifically for your situation. I've used it with a million row list previously and it does the job well.

It is a true virtual mode. In other words memory allocation and list population time remains low regardless of the size of the overall list. This is unlike the DataGridView that really starts to slowdown and use memory on large lists.

To use virtual mode set:

VirtualListMode = true
VirtualListSize= 300000 

(or whatever size your list currently is)

Then handle the RetrieveVirtualItem event to populate the list on demand from your list. You may also wnat/need to handle the CacheVirtualItems and SearchForVirtualItem events.