How do I design/implement paging for Winforms apps/UI Controls using large data sets.
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Hi: I’m working through trying to design some intelligent paging into a system I’m building. The basic 10,000 ft view of what I’m doing is listed below. This is all being done in a .Net Windows app. The basic premise is a ton of data on the backend which will be queried and displayed in some meaningful fashion in the UI. Clearly we don’t want to load everything into the apps memory in one fell swoop. I want to minimize the in-memory dataset by paging in/out what’s currently needed. The “paging” really has to exist between the DB’s & in memory datasets. That’s where performance/usability will be most affected. Currently the front end is .Net/winforms based, making use of Infragistics winform controls (particularly the UltraGrid). Eventually, we'll be migrating to a WPF implementation. Some paging will/should probably occur between the in-memory data sets and the UI controls. Grids will show actual records/rows but only have N rows visible at a time. Other visualizations will display the results of some aggregation of the data. There will ultimately have to be some paging requests get initiated as the “viewport” of data moves at bequest of the UI. I realize that this is not an easy problem to solve. But if I do it right, I should be able to come up with a highly effective reusable design pattern here. I’m guessing that some design patterns must already exist out there. There's got to be a couple of design patterns out there for this. What’s the best way to proceed with this? How big of a PIA/whale am I ultimately tackling here? I can provide a jpeg of a quick 10,000 ft schematic of what I'm trying to do. I know this won’t be trivial. Thanks, JB
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Hi: I’m working through trying to design some intelligent paging into a system I’m building. The basic 10,000 ft view of what I’m doing is listed below. This is all being done in a .Net Windows app. The basic premise is a ton of data on the backend which will be queried and displayed in some meaningful fashion in the UI. Clearly we don’t want to load everything into the apps memory in one fell swoop. I want to minimize the in-memory dataset by paging in/out what’s currently needed. The “paging” really has to exist between the DB’s & in memory datasets. That’s where performance/usability will be most affected. Currently the front end is .Net/winforms based, making use of Infragistics winform controls (particularly the UltraGrid). Eventually, we'll be migrating to a WPF implementation. Some paging will/should probably occur between the in-memory data sets and the UI controls. Grids will show actual records/rows but only have N rows visible at a time. Other visualizations will display the results of some aggregation of the data. There will ultimately have to be some paging requests get initiated as the “viewport” of data moves at bequest of the UI. I realize that this is not an easy problem to solve. But if I do it right, I should be able to come up with a highly effective reusable design pattern here. I’m guessing that some design patterns must already exist out there. There's got to be a couple of design patterns out there for this. What’s the best way to proceed with this? How big of a PIA/whale am I ultimately tackling here? I can provide a jpeg of a quick 10,000 ft schematic of what I'm trying to do. I know this won’t be trivial. Thanks, JB
You're definitely not the first person to tackle this. You can gleen some ideas from these[^].
A guide to posting questions on CodeProject[^]
Dave Kreskowiak -
Hi: I’m working through trying to design some intelligent paging into a system I’m building. The basic 10,000 ft view of what I’m doing is listed below. This is all being done in a .Net Windows app. The basic premise is a ton of data on the backend which will be queried and displayed in some meaningful fashion in the UI. Clearly we don’t want to load everything into the apps memory in one fell swoop. I want to minimize the in-memory dataset by paging in/out what’s currently needed. The “paging” really has to exist between the DB’s & in memory datasets. That’s where performance/usability will be most affected. Currently the front end is .Net/winforms based, making use of Infragistics winform controls (particularly the UltraGrid). Eventually, we'll be migrating to a WPF implementation. Some paging will/should probably occur between the in-memory data sets and the UI controls. Grids will show actual records/rows but only have N rows visible at a time. Other visualizations will display the results of some aggregation of the data. There will ultimately have to be some paging requests get initiated as the “viewport” of data moves at bequest of the UI. I realize that this is not an easy problem to solve. But if I do it right, I should be able to come up with a highly effective reusable design pattern here. I’m guessing that some design patterns must already exist out there. There's got to be a couple of design patterns out there for this. What’s the best way to proceed with this? How big of a PIA/whale am I ultimately tackling here? I can provide a jpeg of a quick 10,000 ft schematic of what I'm trying to do. I know this won’t be trivial. Thanks, JB