ASP.NET limitations?!?

[Milan Todorovic]

Hello guys,

I have an interesting problem which I'm trying to explain. I feel that the
issue is fairly low level to the ASP.NET architecture.

The application that I'm writing processes LARGE amounts of data (storing it
into a DataTable object) and displays the reports it in the DataGrid web
control. The aspx page in question has some other buttons that do simple
redirecting or other elementary actions.

Here is the problem. When the DataGrid is of a reasonable (I know that this
a vague term) size everything works fine. But, if DataGrid becomes large
(several thousand rows), the page starts behaving differently. For one, the
width of the controls on the page (% of the page width) stops working,
spreading the control wider than the screen. This is annoying but relatively
benign. The bigger problem is that in such cases if one clicks on any of the
buttons, the page immediately turns into 'The page cannot be displayed page.
No data processing, no ASP errors - nothing. Just that page as if you lost
the connection to the network. And here is the kicker. The page also
contains regular HTML links. Those work great!

So, my guess that something with the request/response objects is getting
corrupted when these objects carry large amounts of data. An overflow
problem perhaps?!?
Anybody know reason why this is happening? When I understand the reason I
might be able to think about ways to fix it, but up to this point I'm
clueless.

Thanks,

Milan

 

[Ken Cox [Microsoft MVP]]

Hi Milan,

I'm wondering if it has to do with the huge viewstate that such a grid would
maintain? If you aren't allowing editing in the grid, you might want to try
turning off the viewstate to see if that reduces the huge amount of
overhead.

Ken

 

[Milan Todorovic]

Ken,

That worked. Since the grid is used only for displaying (not modifying) data
I could turn it off. It worked great.

Milan

 

[SA]

Milan:

Glad you found a solution. Seems to me like the browser was having some
issues with the page, rather than ASP.NET. Just out of curiosity, did you
examine the HTML that was generated to see if the tags were actually
correctly formed?

Also, displaying 1000s of rows in a single DataGrid may not be the best way
to present data to your users. Even though you have found a solution to the
technical problem, it seems your application could benefit from paging in
the control as well, to solve a "human issue".

HTH,

 

[Ken Cox [Microsoft MVP]]

Hi Milan,

Glad my guess helped. Thanks for reporting back!

Ken