Is a listbox with so many entries really useful to a user? Can any user assimilate, let alone browse through, so much data? Just wondering…
Not quite sure. But I just submitted an app in the MAS that lets a user go through 1800+ items (fonts). I used an HTML table, but it is still a grid. Scrolling is not that unnatural, and since they are graphic items, it is not so dull.
What I added, though, is a series of letters on the right hand side to jump directly to the As, Bs, Cs and so on. A bit like the Contacts app in iOS.
I would believe that in most cases, scrolling through very long lists of items must be rather boring. But hey, spreadsheet users do that all the time…
I’m actually importing datas into multiple tables of a database
there is actually one text file with 109 fields
it’s a quite simple one so I will surely have 250+ cols one day
but yes for the average user you don’t need 200 cols.
In Linux, I load a large Text file into a Listbox
90 MB
164695 Rows
18 Columns
load time
TextInputStream 2:58 Minutes
BinaryStream 2:45 Minutes
Scrolling is ok
Searching in LB is ok (I search in 2 Columns only)
Sorting is not possible (freezes App, I have disabled it)
With that kind of data, a database seems in order.
it’s plain text (tab demilited)
that doesn’t matter
you have to read it in to get it into the listbox - stuff it into an in memory database instead
now you have some really great options for searching & sorting that you’d have to write a HUGE amount of code to emulate
The last company I worked for had an app (I was the backend database engineer), where the webportal had to display a list of doctors that met the search criteria… usually this was a handful (the database had 3.6 million records), but it was possible for them to create a huge return result. The “listbox” never had more than 300 records in it… records were paged in only if required… this not only sped things up, but reduced the memory requirements, which was also important as we had 250+ users online
We never do more than 100 records at a time in a web app. We page everything.
Depending upon the amount of data in a desktop app we’ve done paging in them too. But it really depends on how much data you might be displaying.
I page my lists on what can be seen on a screen…