I have a web form which has the user input the values of certain characteristics, however some of the characteristics have up to 45000 values.
The selects were working earlier, albeit with a slight amount of lag when populating the dropdown and trying to scroll through it fast, but now it does not populate at all and the web form hangs.
Is there a way to efficiently contain this many values into a dropdown? Also which is the best library for searchable comboboxes?
I looked at this implementation as it has a "load on open" feature which I thought might be beneficial, but it did not seem to work and is no longer actively developed.
http://john-oc.github.io/
Thanks
Perhaps it would be better to use an autocomplete feature instead of a select menu in this case. A user can type in the first few characters, causing a request to start filtering results based on their input.
Here are a couple of really good autocomplete plugins:
https://github.com/devbridge/jQuery-Autocomplete
Roll your own:
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/rg16/index.html
I agree with Todd, I think you might want some solution that has autocomplete to hide too many results. I'd even go a step further and suggest bootstrap DataTables: https://datatables.net/manual/styling/bootstrap
You can make searchable tables with this, with the key advantage being that it paginates results, so you don't see it all at once.
I'm a big fan of https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-select. You can have it make a request based on the current text input, and then populate the dropdown.
Since the question is already answered, please let me just contribute here.
You can use the typeaheads from angularStrap to achieve this. Beyond the easy manipulation of data, you can even use to make async calls using data provider.
Related
Is there any way to limit height for dataset dropdown list? When I use <input list="datalist"> and the datalist contains many elements, I'm not able to see them all. Can I limit the list size and add vertical scrolling to list all the alternatives?
I searched the web and the only answer I could find was that it's known issue without solution and to avoid it I should use jquery-ui combobox instead. I have javascript logic based on dataset so replacment with combo would require much effort.
Maybe there is some workaround to achive a limited list in html5?
The short answer is no, there is no easy way to achieve this without JavaScript. It is entirely up to the browser to render an input with a datalist. It will likely differ between browsers and devices as well.
If you go for JavaScript it is a lot of extra work, as you say. Do not forget about touch devices, keyboard navigation, visually impaired visitors and the tools they use when browsing, etc. Research available alternatives carefully, do not take for granted that they are are all good enough for your users. Unfortunately I do not know which ones to recommend myself.
I'm not sure where the best place to start or the best way to achieve this is but I currently have 4 multiple sliders (two handles within on slider), one input box, another 4 checkboxes and a dropdown and have 1000+ results being returned, I want to whenever something is changed, to update the results via jQuery and paginate it.
So far, I have the results return in multiple formats, json, html, but am not sure the best way to achieve this live (onchange of anything) search with pagination.
Any suggestions or if you can point me in the right direction would be very much appreciated.
Not sure where you want to display these 1000+ results.. I hope not in a dropdown as that would seriously upset most users. :D
Have a look at jquery datatables.
I am a relative JavaScript beginner. I am comfortable working with documents (document.getElementById(...) and document.getElementsByTagName(...).. and other document querying functions.
I have been asked to create some sort of a table pagination library for my team. We don't use jQuery or any other third party libraries. So I would have manipulate the table dom or something like that to make it work. In this library, I would have to be able to
set up flexible pagination (Number of rows to be displayed per page may be configured by using some sort of a text box) I took a look at some of the sources jQuery Pagination Plugin. But I can not understand it.
The user should be able to navigate back and forth using some icons. The page number changed should be reflected in the configuration box.
I am not asking for solutions because I would learn to do this on my own. How can I start working on this issue?
Update after observations from nnnn
I am not sure what approach to take, as I had not considered that possibility. Most of the times, we have only about 2000 records to display. I guess if the load does not take too much memory, I would prefer to load before hand and then try to paginate it. Although, I will go with whatever is recommended.
I would highly recommend taking a look at the jquery datatables plugin http://datatables.net/
If you want to implement your UI and just need an Object to handle pagination logic please see this library: https://github.com/pagino/pagino-js
I'm often conflicted about how to approach this problem in my applications. I've used any number of options including:
A generic multiselect - This is my least favorite and most rarely used option. I find the usability to be atrocious, a simple mis-click can screw up all your hard work.
An "autocomplete" solution - Downside: user must have spelling abilities to find the damn values they need, aren't exposed to ones they may not have in mind, and the potential backend performance of substring searching.
Two adjacent multiselects, with an add/remove button - Downsides: still "ugly" imo
Any number of fancy javascript solutions (http://livepipe.net/control/selectmultiple, http://loopj.com/2009/04/25/jquery-plugin-tokenizing-autocomplete-text-entry/, etc.)
I haven't been able to find any usability studies done on the best approach to this problem. Many of these alternate solutions are great when you're going from <10 elements to a hundred, but may break down completely when you are going from a hundred to a thousand.
What do you guys use? Why do you use it? Can you point me to usability case studies? Is there a "magic" solution that has yet to be discovered?
My advice is don't use generic multiple select controls. I've been running User Experience Research for my whole career, and every single time I test a site with multiple select controls, it always turns out to cause problems for end users.
I did a post on this a while back: Multiple Select Controls Must Evolve or Die
Sounds like you knew this anyway, though. Your real question is "what do I use instead?" Well, to answer this question you have to work out whether the user's task leans towards recall or recognition.
(i) By recall, I mean the user knows what they want to pick before they have even seen the list. In this case, it's probably easiest for them if you offer an autocomplete tool (as used very effectively on facebook, for example). This solution is even better when the list of options is also impossibly long to present on a page (e.g. location names, etc).
(ii) Moving on to recognition - by this I mean a task that involves the user not knowing what they want to pick until they've seen the list of options. In this case, autocomplete doesn't give them any hints. An array of checkboxes would be much more helpful. If you can show them all at once, this is helpful to the user. Scrolling DIVs are more compact but they create a memory load for the user - i.e. once they've scrolled down, they have to remember which items they picked. This is particularly evident when users save a form and come back to it later.
So - thinking about your problem, do you need a solution for recall or recognition?
I can't point you to any case studies, unfortunately, but what I can tell you is that I personally prefer large checkbox arrays in two-to-five column layouts. Sure, they take up a lot of space, but they are extremely precise and uncomplicated.
I think for any control - be it basic multiselect, double list, checkbox array, or any other solution - once you go over a certain threshold of items it's going to be challenging for the user no matter what.
Have a look at Dojo Toolkit's DataGrid control. It's by far the most flexible and powerful, and supports multiple row selections. It also has accessibility features built in.
The ExtJS library has some really good solutions for your issue. There a bunch of user extensions for neat-o combos and multi select boxes.
If you want a combo select list, you can add query searching and pagination, plus design the resulting drop-down using easy templating, like in this example:
http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/form/forum-search.html
Here is a nice multiselect, in the style you seemed to describe:
*(main_site)/learn/Extension:Multiselect2
You can find all user extensions here:
*(main_site)/learn/Ext_Extensions
Plus, you can easily include it into an existing web page without alot of extra overhead. ExtJS's full stack is quite large, but to get only the JS files you need, they provide a nice builder tool to grab just those parts you need:
*(main_site)/products/extjs/build/
Just a warning: ExtJS has just released 3.0, but I'm not sure the user extensions have been upgraded. The "forum-search" was taken from a 3.0 example though, so it will work just fine with the latest and greatest.
(*) Apparently new users can only post one link...
I'm looking to utilize jQuery to handle a few very common requests we get for data tables of varying sizes: scrolling, sorting, and dynamic filtering.
I've handled scrolling in the past by having two separate tables with fixed width columns, along with associated div containers for the "actual" scrolling. However, this method doesn't work with any of the jQuery-based sorting table extensions that I've come across (tablesorter being my favorite so far) as they want everything in a single table.
For filtering, they're requesting something akin to how Excel and SharePoint lists do it (basically all column values are listed in a dropdown, allowing the user to select/deselect them). I haven't seen anything like that yet, although it sounds possible.
One other related nice-to-have feature would be the ability to "freeze" a column for horizontal scrolling.
Ideally I'd like an existing extenstion, but if none are out there I'd also appreciate suggestions from any jQuery gurus on how to best implement it. My current thoughts are to dive into tablesorter and extend/update it as necessary.
To hopefully keep things focused, paging is not an option (along with anything server based, for that matter).
Update:
I do appreciate the answers so far, but none of the options given so far touch on the filtering aspect at all (that said, I must admit that jqGrid looks very good for some future projects I have). In the meantime I'll work on a custom filtering solution; if it works out I'll update again.
I came across this question as I was searching for a sortable table plugin myself; I really wasn't impressed with any of the suggested widgets, but later I discovered DataTables, and I was quite impressed. I recommend checking it out.
Maybe this excellent plug-in could do it:
Demo page
It's called jQGrid, here is the project page:
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jqGrid
I would encourage you to try out the Flexigrid.
It has a lot of great features and I personally think it looks more professional than the jqGrid.
It doesn't have some of the features that you asking for, but I think it could be a good start. It would be great if you could work on adding some of those features to the code base.
If you are coding in c#, then I posted a blog entry about how to use LINQ to Reflection to bind JSON to the Flexigrid... if you are using another language there are other examples you can find on Flexigrid's Website & Google Group page.
a simple jQuery Scrollable Table Plugin
As mentioned in my update, I ended up using a custom filtering extension (closed source, unfortunately). I've recently started using SlickGrid and it's now my go-to grid.
I'd like to add the Laravel flavored DataTables (GitHub, jquery DataTables API) - perfect if you already work with PHP/Laravel.
Extra, koalyptus/TableFilter another custom filter table (actually, my fav).