Optimization

 

OK I think I would like some help on this one.

If you have a minute to look at this site Scoilnet, for example the Primary Teachers section, I have a Resource Finder box on the top left column.

This is working fine, 3 dropdown menus. When you call something from the first menu, I create the second one depending on the items of the first one. You are still follow me :-)

Great, so I do the same with the third menu, and I have at this stage a Go button to finally show you the resources selected on another page.

My issue here, and surely you can guess if you do the above steps, is the refresh process between each postback.

So what I am trying to do is to optimize the postback. I tried some Cache, but the number of items in each dropdown could change very often.

And a user could also select many different options, so how I am suppose to cache 3 dropdown ?

Of course, I could build 'statically' some Javascript arrays, but imagine the ugly effects regarding the maintenance.

The SmartNavigation option crash for this page ( surely too complex), in case somebody think about this stuff.

I am still looking for some opinions on this, so feel free to comment


2 Comments

  • This came up in one of my classes, and this is what we came up with (all theoretical, but I think it would work).



    The first option we thought of was to dynamically generate the JavaScript code for the drop down lists. Which, in theory, could work. The problem lied in the fact that in total there 10000+ items for the third drop down list that we were trying to narrow down.



    Our other idea involved a hidden iframe that would do all the work for us, and then update the drop down lists via JavaScript. Once again, nasty.



    The postback is going to be only as fast as their connections most of the time, so we were trying to do as much on the client side as possible (without sending down a ton of data).



    If you run across a good solution, I'd love to see it.

  • Have a look at Andy Smiths site...he has a bunch of controls which do what you want...oh and are free...and work really well!

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