Re: How to present large datasets on the Web?

Hiya guys

In the context of providing/exchanging  data via HTML - say with SOAP, Web
services or some kind of process that hoovers up HTML into a database-  it
seems to me that the idea of sending 5000 records over the web is not as
unlikely a scenario as it might seem.

I have heard of at least one mob that routinely transfer huge numbers of
records using these kind of methods (in the millions of rows)

I agree that the idea of a person displaying a 5000 line record might seem
odd, but "something" requesting a 5000 line record might well be able to do
something meaningful with the data.

If you think about it like this, then the idea of a subfile might also be
inconvenient.

Don't know if this applies in this case, but adds something of a spin to it :)

Given Buck's original request, I wonder if there is a way to send the first
page of the HTML request (equivalent to the first page of the subfile) and
somehow continue extracting the remainder of the data and cache it so that
the query is executed once, but subsequent extracts do not have to repeat
the database access.

Maybe if you wrote the query back into a data queue (problems with paging
back etc) or wrote the records into a user space and then signalled the
server that the first page was available and continued writing them.

Buck - are we even close to where you are going with this stuff ?

Regards
Evan Harris

So.  Has anyone tried to routinely display a list that contains five or ten

thousand entries on the web?  What architectural approach did you take?
  --buck

Um, nobody looks at 5000 records at a shot, do they?

You need to invent a subfile mechanism - You know - 'get the next page of
records', 'get the previous page of records', and so on.  Have your java
person call your program and give it a selected page number as a
parameter.  Your RPG program locates that page of records and returns it.

It would even be fun to add filtering and sorting capabilities - You know,
longest telephone calls, highest cost calls, and so forth.  Resequence the
display by number dialed.



Regards,
Rich