Is this the grid for me?

I am trying to find something to replace our current HTML tables that we use. The main problem is the performance since there can be over 1,000 records and then each cell could be different based on what the value is. For example, there is a column of checkboxes but sometimes based on rules, there isn't a checkbox or it could be disabled. Same thing for drop down boxes. And then based on certain values a cell could have a different style applied to it like background color, different colored borders, etc. There is also the need to have a row be just one long colspan. Oh, and I left out the need for some rows, not all, to have expand/collapse capability. Everything works fine with the HTML tables, it's just too slow displaying.

So we are thinking about perhaps getting a grid to use instead. I have tried the free trial here for a few days now, have read through a lot of forum posts, and a lot of the documentation. I am just not sure if this can really meet our needs.

All our data is returned as a database recordset so I can do anything with it, whether creating XML, Javascript arrays, etc. I have it working right now with a large static XML file and the performance is fine. However, none of the rule checking that I mentioned has been applied so it's just a dump of the XML.

If there is a way to specify with XML attributes to make a cell do various things like make it a checkbox, check it, disable it, and use a certain CSS class, then I haven't found out how to do that. Same thing with arrays.

If there isn't a way to do the above with say the XML, I'm not sure if I should dump out the XML like it is and then go through the entire grid cell by cell and apply API to make it do what we want.

I could go through the recordset cell by cell and create the grid with the API but that would probably be just as slow as our HTML tables.

So having said all that, is this grid what we need as it can really do what we need, or do I really need to find an HTML table replacement control, wherever that might exist?

Things which are NOT possible in the current grid:

- expand/collapse capability
- one long colspan row (sort of, you can make custom row template)
- disabled state (images are there, but the logic is not implemented yet)

Rule-based formatting is possible, here is one example -

http://www.activewidgets.com/javascript.forum.12814.2/better-way.html

Rule-based cell template selection might be difficult (but certainly possible). If the number of 'exceptions' is small then it would be much easier to assign some of the templates cell-by-cell -

grid.setCellTemplate(checkbox, 2); // checkboxes in column-2
grid.setCellTemplate(text, 2, 1); // text in col-2, row-1 (exception)

Thanks for the reply Alex. The example was interesting. I'll have to play some more with it and what else you mentioned. I did see that friendsofaw.com had an example of expand/collapse that might work.

Jeff,

I've used this grid since 2004 and it performs great. I haven't worked with tree-structured data, but I've seen examples of such implementation on friendsofaw.com. If you do not have to show all the 1000 rows at once, then I'd suggest paging to maximize on speed.