How to clear Session used in paging of a gridview - asp.net

I have implemented paging in Gridview and in order to avoid frequent Reconnection with database,I used Session to store data.So that data could be retrieved from session on changing page index of Gridview.
But my problem is that when should I clear this session as it's usable only for this very page.And if I use ViewState then it will not be fine if data increases in amount.
Looking forward for valuable suggestion of yours.....
Thanks in advance
Supriya

You should not be saving any data to sessions. If the data control requires data per page it is fine to select only the rows you need from the data base per page change.
So if you have say 100 rows and 10 rows per page, then you should be retrieving 10 rows per PageChange of the data control. This is perfectly acceptable especially when combined with caching.
Ifyou are using SQl 2005 see this post:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/01/07/434787.aspx

I don't think you should worry about the database connections. Connection pooling will take case of that. You have to open connection and close as soon as you get paged records.
If you store your records in viewstate/cache this will unnecesarily use resources and might be out of sync with database. I consider it as a bad approach.
You should make a call each time you change page and retrieve records from db.
Hope it helps.

Related

Grid loading too slow with out pagination

We have developed Asp.net web application. and we are using asp.net gridview to display the records and edit.
here we have 5000 rows and 23 columns in single grid. it is taking long time for binding. our client refuse the pagination option. how to make the binding faster with 5000 to 7000 records.
Please Advise.
Thanks
Mayil.M
Where is your data come from? Is it database or other external resource?
You can use caching so you don't load the whole dataset from the external resource but from the memory. Please note this solution will not work if your data changes often.
Another approach would be to use some kind of partial loading mechanism using for example Ajax. This will however require changing approach as I am not sure the grid view control supports this. You would have to create custom control and then make sequential requests (using for example Ajax) for smaller chunks (eg. 200 records) of data and display them. Eventually you will have complete set but the data will be available faster.
Finally you can combine both, to make it even faster.
You should implement your own paging mechanism. The problem is that DataBind retrieves all 7000 records (although only i.e. 20 is displayed/rendered). Create for example a stored procedure that will fetch only selected range of records (if you are on Page 2 you need to display only record id > 20 and <= 40 - considering that your pagesize is 20). Use SQL server CTE to get the row number (on SQL Server side) and features like BETWEEN. This stored procedure would return only those records which you really need to. Then change your grid view to get the data from this stored procedure.
You can load data on scroll like facebook wall.

Display Paging In ASP.NET GridView Even with a single Page

In My Database I Have 10000000 Records. In GridView First I Am Showing First 10 Records. In Order To See the Next Records User Need to Click Page Numbers ( 1,2,3,------10000). But As I'm Retrieving 10 Records for The First Time GridView Paging is not Showing.
Is There Any Way To Show Paging In ASP.NET GridView Statically ?
For so many records, I won't recommend Paging. You can show Top 20 recently added records and provide options to filter out records. A user can enter keywords. ReQuery and ReBind the GridView with this new result set.
You might also consider using PetaPoco, a Micro-ORM, which will help you fetch paged result.
With so many records, you really need to take into account the exact queries being run to pull back the data.
There are numerous ways of doing data paging ( http://beyondrelational.com/modules/2/blogs/28/posts/10434/sql-server-server-side-paging-with-rownumber-function.aspx ). However, the "best" way is dependent on the exact version of SQL Server you are running.
Essentially, the solutions boil down to you passing a page number and number of records per page through some type of query. Usually a stored procedure as the query can be quite messy.
Once there, you have an option. Either send the total record count back as an OUT parameter in your query and the result set back normally, or you send the total record count back as a column. There are definitely efficiency concerns with both options as one way requires the query to be run twice and the other requires an extra column of data which increases network traffic.
Once you have that solved then you can figure out exactly how you want the UI to work.

Is SqlDataSource created for each client that connects to a server?

Assume I have a page with a data grid bound to a data source. If I have 2 different clients accessing this page, is the data source different for each of them, or do they use the same data source?
If they're the same, what happens if a client applies a filter? The other clients sees that filter too? How to avoid this?
If they're not the same, and I have a big number of records, and data source mode is to DataSet, would this store 2 copies of same data on server? How do I solve such problems?
The SqlDataSource control is an instance class, so it would be recreated on each request. You may want to look into connection pooling though, so you can reuse database connections.
I don't think it's possible to make the control static, and I don't think you need to make the control static. If you want to reuse the dataset for all users who visit the page, I would look into caching the DataSet, or storing it in application state. I believe you can do this with the SqlDataSource using a mixture of the OnSelecting and OnSelected events.
Cache the DataSet in the OnSelected event
In the OnSelecting event, check to see whether you have a cached DataSet, and cancel the the select if you do.
They are separate unless you have made the Dataset static, then it will be shared across all instances of the page. I'm not sure what problem you are trying to solve exactly? Is there no database behind the dataset? Or are you worried about the memory consumption?

Viewstate or Session or Database Call

I have a this asp.net page which upon first time load:
1: Make a DB call and get data - XML string (this chunk can go beyond 100kb). And this DB call is a bit expensive takes about 5-10 secs.
2: I loop through this XML and create a Custom Collection with values from XML. Then Bind it to a Repeater Control.
Now the repeater control has one text input. User is free to enter values in one or more or all TBs or leave all blank. Then then hit Save button.
On Save Postback, I will have to loop through all rows in the Repeater, Collect all the rows that has some input in the and generate an XML using the initial values and this new input value and Save it to DB.
Problem:
So I will need reference to all the initial XML values. I can think of these options and looking for inputs on selecting a best one.
1: ViewState: Store my Collection or XML string in ViewState - I'm sure it is will be too huge
2: Session: Use Session to store Collection of xml string - Again
3: DB Call: Make a DB call to get the data again - as I said it is kind of expensive call and my DBA is asking me to avoid this
4: HiddenField: Store the essential data from XML in to HiddenField and use that for Save manipulation. i.e. in each repeater item find all the hiddenfields
Which one is best in terms of better request response and less resource utilization on server?
Or is there a better way I am missing?
PS: Have to use ASP.NET 2.0 WebForms only.
Update1:
I tried the following with ViewState:
1: Store entire xml string: ViewState length = 97484 and FireBug shows pagesize - 162Kb
2:Store stripped down version of Collection with required only data: ViewState length = 27372 and FireBug shows pagesize - 94Kb and with gzip compression it reduces to 13kb.
With the existing website FireBug shows Size 236Kb.
So definitely option 2 is better and my new version is better then current website.
So any inputs?
A quick question - who is your target audience for this page? If it's an internal website for a company then just storing the data in viewstate might be acceptable. If it's for external people, e.g. potential customers, then speed and performance probably matter to you more.
Viewstate - have you tried adding your XML to viewstate? How much did it increase the page size by? If you're gzipping all of your pages rather than sending them over the wire uncompressed then you could see about a 70% reduction in size - 30kb isn't that much these days...
Session - it is worth remembering that the server can and will drop data from sessions if it runs out of space. They can also expire. Do you trust your users not to log in again in a new tab and then submit the page that they've had open for the last 10 hours? While using session results in less data on the wire you might need to re-pull the data from the db if the value does end up being dropped for whatever reason. Also, if you're in a web farm environment etc there are complications involving synchronizing sessions across servers.
DB Call - can the query be optimised in any way? Are the indices on all the fields that need them? Maybe you and your DBA can make it less painful to pull. But then again, if the data can change between you pulling it the first time and the user submitting their changes then you wouldn't want to re-pull it, I suspect.
Hidden Fields - With these you'd be saving less data than if you put the whole string in Viewstate. The page wouldn't be depending on the state of the webserver like with session and nor would you be racing against other users changing the state of the db.
On the whole, I think 4 is probably the best bet if you can afford to slow your pages down a little. Use Firebug/YSlow and compare how much data is transmitted before and after implementing 4.
One final thought - how are things like this persisted between postbacks in the rest of your webapp? Assuming that you haven't written the whole thing on your own/only just started it you might be able to find some clues as to how other developers in a similar situation solved the problem.
Edit:
there is a load-balancer, not sure how it will play with Session
If you have a load balancer then you need to make sure that session state is stored in a state server or similar and not in the process ("inproc"). If the session is stored on the webserver then option 2 will play very badly with the load balancer.
While I'm not a huge fan of overusing session, this will probably be your best bet as it will be your fastest option from the user's standpoint.
Since session state does have it's own inherit issues, you could load the data you need into session, and if your session drops for whatever reason, just do another database hit and reload it.
I would really stay away from options 1 and 4 just because of the amount of unnecessary data you will be sending to the client, and potentially slowing down their experience.
Option 3 will also slow down the user experience, so I would stay away from that if at all possible unless you can speed up your query time.

Fetch from database one use many times

I would like to fetch a number of records from a database to fill a DropDownList that is filled in a OnItemDataBound of a DataList.
I think it might be a bit much to fetch all the records every time a DropDownList is bound since they are the same.
How can this be done?
If I understand your question correctly, you could put your drop down list into a user control, and then output cache it, which would mean the resulting drop down list would not keep making new requests to the database each time it is loaded.
MSDN has quite a good article on output caching:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hdxfb6cy.aspx

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