Jonathan, thanks for taking time to reply with an excerpt from the book. I have to assume that for potentially large recordsets my best bet is to hand off to the server for sorting/paging rather than storing thousands of rows browser-side. Would you agree?
On Apr 9, 2:50 pm, Jonathan Chaffer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Apr 6, 2007, at 13:53 , Paul wrote: > > > I'm curious how you all handle paged tabular data that also needs > > to be sortable. I would typically rely on ajax to retrieve next > > 25 / previous 25 rows, but if the user can sort any column they > > want they effectively change what "next 25" means every time they > > click a column header. Do I need to abandon the tablesorter plugin > > and simply use ajax to rebuild the table or is there a better way? > > Yes, you pretty much have to do both on the browser or both on the > server. You can send all the data to the browser and have it paged > there, or you can perform the sort on the server. Here's a relevant > excerpt from The Good Book (no not that one): > > Sorting and Paging Go Together > > Data that is long enough to benefit from sorting is likely long > enough to be a candidate for paging. It is not unusual to wish to > combine these two techniques for data presentation. Since they both > affect the set of data that is present on a page, though, it is > important to consider their interactions while implementing them. > > Both sorting and pagination can be accomplished either on the server > or in the web browser. We must keep the strategies for the two tasks > in sync, however. Otherwise, we can end up with confusing behavior. > Suppose, for example, that both sorting and paging is done on the > server: > > 2509_07_08.png > 23KViewDownload > > > > When the table is re-sorted by number, a different set of rows is > present on page one of the table. If paging is done by the server and > sorting by the browser, though, the entire data set is not available > for the sorting routine and so it goes wrong: > > 2509_07_09.png > 13KViewDownload > > > > Only the data already present on the page can be displayed. To > prevent this from being a problem, we must either perform both tasks > on the server, or both in the browser. > > -- > Jonathan Chaffer > Technology Officer, Structure Interactive
