Page with many form elememts

[Yaron C.]

Hello,

I would like to ask for your help.

I am trying to create a page with table of many form elements.
The size of the table is 84x10 (84 rows, 10 columns) and each cell
contains 1 form element (select box, checkbox, etc ...)

As you can see I have 840 form elements in the page.

Q: Why so big table?, Why so many form elements?
A: I have 84 channels that I would like the user to configure while
seeing the rest of the channels.

My problem is that it takes almost 10 seconds to display the page and
another 10 seconds to set the elements with the server data (read by
ASP function).

My website is loaded only by IE 5.0 and above.

My questions are:

Can I use so many elopements in 1 page?,
Would I will have problem with submitting so many elements?
Do you know where I can see the max elements per page for IE?

Any others ways how to handle so many elements?
Any other web technologies to think about?


BTW:
To which other newsgroups should I try sending this message?

Thanks,

Yaron

 

[GIMME]

To speed up the rendering of the page with 840 rows
I recommend making 840 tables instead of using 1 table
with 840 rows.

That will make it so that the browser doesn't have
to render the data for all 840 rows before rendering
one large table. This approach also has the side effect
of making things look nice even if the data in one of
the rows has several hundred characters in which results
in making all your columns real wide - just to accommodate
that one row of globby data.

To speed up processing on the back end, I recommend using
just one form, but labelling the controls for each row sequentially.

Like this :

<form>
<table width=690><tr>
<td><input type=checkbox name=chk_1></td>
<td>Color<input type=text name=color_1></td>
<td>Make<input type=text name=make_1></td>
</tr></table>
<table width=690><tr>
<td><input type=checkbox name=chk_2></td>
<td>Color<input type=text name=color_2></td>
<td>Make<input type=text name=make_2></td>
</tr></table>
table width=690><tr>
<td><input type=checkbox name=chk_3></td>
<td>Color<input type=text name=color_3></td>
<td>Make<input type=text name=make_3></td>
</tr></table>
<input type=hidden name=total_items value=3>
</form>

This approach does three things :

1. It lets you parse the value of color_* and make_* which come to
the server - you don't have to hard code something for each value 1,2, and 3.

and

2. Lets you iterate through only the set of rows which have been
checked in the checkbox. This is especially useful if you want the
user to be able to delete several items at once or to select or
manipulate the information for several items at once.

3. Since the code will be iterating through only the stuff it needs to
know about that should help improve the 10 second processing time.

Incidentally, instead of using a sequential approach it may be
better to use unique identifiers from the database. So that you
can iterate through all the items you might create a hidden variable.

For example, (not the same example as the one shown above)

You could create this :

<input type=hidden name=database_ids value=1,3,5,9 >

Then you can parse database_ids on the back end, determine that there
are four items, with database ids 1,3,5 and 9.