How to visualize a machine scheduling plan?

[bjung]

Hi! We have to visualize a maschine scheduling plan in a winform-application... An example of such a plan in ascii-style: machine |00:00|00:10|00:20|00:30|00:40|00:50 --------|--------------------------------------- M1 |Job1A| |Job2A|Job3C| |Job1B M2 | |Job3B| | | | M3 |Job3A| |Job1A|Job2B|Job3C| ------------------------------------------------ | | | | | | I hope you get the idea ;-) First idea: Find a free control that can display gantt-charts --> no (appropriate) found --> the good ones are not free, unfortunately these are no option for a university assignment :-( Second idea: We use a datagrid, with many, many columns. Each column represents a certain timespan. The rows are the machines, and a marked cell means that the machine y is busy at time x. For each job that was scheduled, we wan't to use a different color, part-jobs of the same job have the same color. Unfortunatelly we encountered several problems: We use a datatable as datasource for the grid, and "..Columns.Add(...)" seems to have severe performance problems for #columns>2000, for #columns>10000 the computation time is inacceptable. The same problems, in an even more akward fashion occured while binding the DataTable ot the datagrid. I think the problem is that we have many columns (>100.000) with only a few rows (<100). If anyone has an idea how to get over these performance problems or how to visualize the machine scheduling plan in a completely different way, your help would be greatly appreciated... with kind regards, Benjamin Jung

[Tom Ollar]

Just paint it in a user control - how hard could it be? 100,000 objects is too big for any C# model - figure a way to paint only the part the user can see, incrementally reading the necessary data. You can usually do this pretty well by creating a matrix of cells which fills the user control, and then "rolling" the data behind them as the user scrolls.