Grid & Rowspan != performance

Suite and Optimus Suite 5
#1

Hi!
We’re using dhtmlx grid 2.1 pro version. We should load complex dataset around 300 rows from xml many row spans, around 20 fields (size of xml around 300kb).

It’s taking around 10 seconds to render the table (i think a bit less it firefox and more in internet explorer). We can’t use smart renderer since rowspan…(we’ve tried all spans was disabled)
And in case using of “Distributed Parsing” it’s showing all spans with extra lines, after full loading of grid it’s removing it (IMHO - ugly).

  1. Is it expected behavior (showing of extra lines in Distributed Parsing during rendering, slow rendering in case full preload) .
  2. Will migration to JSON or upgrade to 2.5 change the situation?
  3. Any additional suggestions?
#2

p.s. rowspan it’s critical funcionality for us, we can’t disable it.

#3

Unfortunately the is no way to increase loading performance of grid with spanned rows.
Row span functionality is incompatible with Smart Rendering and Distributed Parsing. Loading from JSON works the same as loading from XML format.

#4

You can make the cells “look” like they are a rowspan with some specially crafted CSS, as is what we had to do to gain performance.

The idea is to have a flat border with a certain color around each cell and the cell having another certain background color - and where you want to show to cells spanning rows, you make the bottom border of the top cell the same color as its background, and in a similar fashion, do the bottom cell’s top border.

You can position the text on the bottom cell where it won’t show with a text-indent: -1000px CSS rule, or by some other means. You will want to do this because it is possible you might need that data for calculations, for example.