massive string array (40000) elements in listbox - c#

I know this is a stupid question, I need to let you guys know that I am fully aware that it is useless in 99% of situations to make a listbox with this many elements in c#:
That being said I need this to be done...is there any way to populate a listbox with 40000 elements without it completely destroying performance/freezing up, thanks!
note: I have tried it, this is per the exact requirements of a professor...when adding 40000 elements through a DataSource and DataBind the application freezes up

You tell me.
for(i=0;i<40000;i++)
{
listBox1.Items.Add("click me");
}

Even if is possible (I never tried it), the usability for this form will be 0.
In that cases a more usable implementation is via lookup text-boxes and lists, where the user can enter a text to search record that matches this text and displays them in a any kind of list.

It is of course possible to do it, but not very practicable.
When using a desktop technology like WinForms or WPF, for a large number of items like this you are better off using something like an auto complete textbox, and have it set to filter/search after the user has typed two or three characters. In this case you can also use a control that offers scrolling virtualisation - this means that there is only a limited number of UI elements created in the scrolling portion of the dropdown, and those elements get reused when a scroll occurs. If you don't use virtualisation then a new element gets created for every list item that gets scrolled in to view. (Note that Silverlight controls have this functionality - just in case it's an option).
For ASP.NET though I would suggest that you do not want to do anything that would cause a large transfer of data (large items, or small items but lots of them) as it won't be performant. Instead you should look to do what Google does - retrieve search results in a paged fashion.

Related

Dynamically creating Tab+DataGrid for binding with multiple different classes?

I apologize for the crappy title, I wasn't quite sure how to summarize what I'm trying to do.
My scenario:
I am refactoring an existing WinForms application to WPF and MVVM. I'm currently working on a module that provides search functionality for a database comprised of many different tables such as Contact, User, Case, Product, etc. In code-behind there are classes which provide an Object for each. I have written wrapper classes for each of the searchable table Objects that expose only the properties a user would want/need to see in the search results for each type of Object, for binding to a DataGrid.
Once these search results exist, they need to be displayed in a combination of Tab Controls and Data Grids, like so:
Because of some use cases, I need to be able to create an individual display Tab+DataGrid for the results of every single search that is performed. I cannot have a single tab for each type of search that is shown/hidden as needed.
I'm not sure how to proceed from where I currently am to the goal pictured and described above. Thanks for any help anyone can provide.
Not sure I entirely understand your question, but it looks to me that it might be a candidate for datatemplateselector.
Basically, you use an ItemsControl bound to your result collection and then - using a datatemplateselector - you swap in the appropriate template to display the item based upon a code inspection.
That will let you present all the results in a single list.
If you want to display your results in a tabs, I would present a collection of each result type in your viewmodel. So you have a Users collection and a seperate Products collection. Then you can bind individual data grids to each template.
If you want to then hide the tabs when no results are present, add a data trigger using the expression.interactivity namespace to trigger the visibility of each tab page based on its respective collection count.
One more thing, if you want to create tab items dynamically, i.e. One tab for each search - the tab control has an ItemSource property. If you group each search result into an object an expose an observable collection of that object, you can bind that to your tab control and have it create tab items for each search result. Just make that object contain a collection of actual results and you should be able to create a itemscontrol as mentioned here already.
Sorry if this appears a bit of a mind dump, but like I said - not sure if I entirely get the question :)
Rather then chuck a load of code snippets in, there a plenty of samples just a google away if anything sounds helpful.

Text user control with sorting possibility

I need control in winforms that can add tens lines per second. I use now richtextbox, but i'm looking for something with sorting possibility (according some datatime or int)
Lines which are added are just custom objects complex of several int and datetime.
Delay aspect is quite important here.
EDIT:
It can be also some table/grid, but I suppose it take too much time (searching existing lines and inserting new line into appropriate place)
RichTextBox will typically offer more overhead in managing, searching, and inserting.
Much more appropriate would be a control like ListView. It gives simpler control over sorting, scrolling, and more.
Additionally, ListView has the ability to handle Virtual data backing. If performance or content size is an issue, this will let you only worry about the sub-set currently displayed in the ListView "view" window.
Two options
Use RichTextBox as you are doing now hold the data in a structure like SortedList from which the control will be updated.
Or, you can use a Grid, format the look and feel of the grid to remove the row & column grid lines and each new line will get appended this way you can let user sort by clicking on the header...
As for adding say ten lines per second I am pretty certain both these controls can handle more traffic than that....

making listView acting like treeView in winforms

is there any way to make winforms listView showing data like treeView. i mean to make it verticaly oriented and to show columnHeaders one under another and not to put them in horizontal line?
thanx for assistance
Consider using this open-source ObjectListView.
It's a mature control that can show all sorts of lists, a tree-list and much much more (not my code - I'm just a happy user).
It take a few minutes to get used to the idea of using it, but once you got it - using it is a breeze.
Examples:
You can also consider using Better ListView. The usage is 99% same as the original .NET ListView, but it has many extras. For example, every item has a ChildItems property in which you can put further children.

WPF (irc) chat log control

I'm trying to learn WPF and was thinking about creating a simple IRC client. The most complicated part is to create the chat log. I want it to look more or less like the one in mIRC:
or irssi:
The important parts are that the text should be selectable, lines should wrap and it should be able to handle quite large logs.
The alternatives that I can come up with are:
StackPanel inside a ScrollViewer where each line is a row
ListView, since that seems more suitable for dynamic content/data binding.
Create an own control that does the rendering on its own.
Is there any WPF guru out there that has some ideas on which direction to take and where to start?
I suggest you start with a good object model independent of the UI, and then try a multi-line TextBox or a RichTextBox.
Whether these will suffice will depend on exactly how long you want the log to be able to get. If you run into performance issues, you may need to look at virtualization.
First of all, you should consider if you want to select only entire row (like in a listbox), or if you want to select certain characters from a row (like in a textbox).
In the first case, I think a ListView or even a ListBox should be enough, both of them support virtualization when bound to collection and there should be no problem with huge amounts of data. A stack panel inside a ScrollViewer is a little bit like reinventing the wheel for this case and creating a new control is not a very inspired approach in my opinion (as the functionality you want can be achieved with the existing controls, in WPF).
In the second case, if you want to select some text inside of a line, or if you want word wrapping for your longest lines in the log and want to select individual parts of the wrapped lines, then you need to use a control more oriented on displaying text. Kent already suggested a RichTextBox, I would add AvalonEdit control or even the WebBrowser control in which you directly modify its HTMLDocument.
I would suggest to use RichTextBox too, and store items in a log file or database, if you run into performance issues.
Another solution is to use the WPF WebBrowser control and modifiy its HTML content with:
webBrowser.NavigateToString("<HTML><H2><B>This page comes using String</B><P></P></H2></HTML>");
More information about using WebBrowser control

Windows Forms Control - Huge list of filenames

Which control would be best for showing a huge (300.000+) list of filenames?
I've tried DataGridView, but it seems to be overkill and also slow.
Are there better alternatives?
None.
No USER will be able to handle a single list of 300.000+ entries in a meaningful way. Looks like your design is seriously flawed - do you really have to present the complete list?
Consider using a search box and let the users search the file names (use auto completion/suggestions like Google et.al.) or create a separate list for every starting letter (like most address books do). Or find another way to reduce the number of entries from which the user has to select.
The standard ListView control has a virtual mode designed specifically for your situation. I've used it with a million row list previously and it does the job well.
It is a true virtual mode. In other words memory allocation and list population time remains low regardless of the size of the overall list. This is unlike the DataGridView that really starts to slowdown and use memory on large lists.
To use virtual mode set:
VirtualListMode = true
VirtualListSize= 300000
(or whatever size your list currently is)
Then handle the RetrieveVirtualItem event to populate the list on demand from your list. You may also wnat/need to handle the CacheVirtualItems and SearchForVirtualItem events.
Set up pagination and restrict the number of rows displayed by the DataGrid. You can add a combobox to jump between pages. This is a standard solution.
also see this post https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2125963/need-help-in-gridview-and-table
Have you tried the ListView with report style? This is the control used by Windows natively in its file browsers.
Following on from gotch4's answer. Here is a good article from CodeProject on how to do paging with a DataGridView.
You might want to check out ObjectListView, specifically the VirtualObjectListView:
http://objectlistview.sourceforge.net/cs/index.html
I forget off hand what license it has been released under so you might want to look at that before using it in a commercial application.

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