TextArea data storage/retrieval

[jcale4]

Hello,

I have a general question around the handling of textareas in ASP. I have a page with several textareas where the user can enter up to 2000 characters. When the user pulls an "existing" page with these textareas filled out, there is obviously a bottleneck. I have used Ajax a little to reduce the amount of data that gets transfered back to the client, but are there other things that I can do from a front-end perspective to try and speed up the retrieval of those records?

Thanks!

 

[damber]

How many text boxes ?

The bottleneck isn't likely to be the rendering of 50 or so text boxes.. the bottleneck will either be in the pipe or in the server. So looking at 'front-end' improvements isn't likely to make the page load much faster.

With pipe bottlenecks you are limited by the users connection to the internet, and traffic between you and them.. the only thing you can do is reduce the overhead - using AJAX in this instance (whilst showing/loading them progressively) is likely to be ADDING to the overhead, as each XMLHttpRequest will have a HTTP header and separate data calls - whereas just letting the page output the content wont have such overheads. As you want all the data from the server anyway, how can you reduce the data content ?? if you can, then reduce it in the output in the initial page load!

So, your opportunity is really at the server - this is where you are most likely to improve performance if at all. First check that the code is generally streamlined (remove unnecessary stuff), then look at the method by which you retrieve the data (assuming from a database), ensure the SQL is efficient, then ensure you handle the recordset efficiently - e.g. use getrows or getstring etc - as well as using response.flush appropriately - there are at least 3 threads in the ASP forum that will describe this in detail - use the search function to find them.



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[Sheco]

Maybe the user doesnt need to see the entire 2000 characters unless they wish to edit the textarea? If so you could only use the first 100 characters and disable it and put a checkbox to "enable" editing that would go do an AJAX GET of the complete data?