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Good alternate to the DataGridView

Hi,

I have an application (for displaying financial information) that has for example 20 dynamic unbound datagridview controls, each has 18 columns and about 5 rows

I have routines that can update any cell by its grid name row index and cell index,this routine is on a constant cycle every 800ms applying changes to the cells and changing their colours accordingly. At any one pass I am changing on average about 40 cells

I need to reflect changes in 'realtime' and I have all my scavaging code as well as cell coordinate and change code down to about 400ms using threading on quad core CPU's

The problems:

1) The paint/refresh time in the grids are poor, I know my routines end well before the actual paint happens
2) All the grids are in a TablePanel and when scrolling the panel, the paint is even worse, just turns into white lines until a full refresh is done
3) I can't flash cells, i.e. change their colours for 5 seconds and revert to white without freezing the application (cant work out how to access a control from one thread to another)

I need an alternative, I come from an ASP.NET background, and using AJAX on an html page to display this much info, and flash cells etc is very simple, and a browser seems to have no problems with painting during scroll, or replacing cell contents without having to struggle. I am thinking about embedding a web control and creating HTML on the fly and sending JS commands to change cells etc. This is alot of work for me and I would like to know anyones thoughts on alternates??

Thanks

graye

Have you tried to control the sequence of the layout of the DataGridView via the SuspendLayout() and ResumeLayout() methods? For example, you could wait until all of the grids have been updated and then turn on ResumeLayout for each (to get them to all repaint at one time).

As a test, you might even try a Suspend/Resume at the form level (rather than the individual DataGridView's)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.suspendlayout.aspx

bhermer

ASKER

I have tried (and I am doing it) at component level, I will try at form level tomorrow, but I am not sure it will help because then I will be delaying the whole forms update, and the idea here is to have almost instant updates, not to mention I need to get the whole refresh done in under 200ms

Have you ever used any other controls that have the same functionality but better performace? trouble being I think, the control is to heavy weight for what I need, I would probably have better performance with dynamic created labels!

I am thinking about writing an html page and dynamically adding, changing tables using javascript via the webbrowser navigate function ,javascript:void(JS) do you have an opinion on this perhaps?

Thanks

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rachitkohli

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bhermer

ASKER

Hi, thanks for that, unfortunatly the second one relys on ASP.NET engine running this is a thick application and it wont have access to an ASP instance.

I will have a play with the first one and let you know

bhermer

ASKER

I am accepting this answer, simply because it gave me a better upderstanding on how to write my own