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User Groups : Forums : SiteExperts : Dynamic HTML
:  | Tree + Lazy Loading + Endless Scrolling Has anybody ever seen such an AJAXed tree with BOTH "Lazy Loading" and "Endless Scrolling"? Any pointers to where you've seen it?
Or at least, pull me out if you think I'm heading into a wrong direction. Thanks. Here's the situation.
I may have a tree, having multiple roots, each of which may be N-level deep, with each branch possibly having N number of nodes and/or sub-branches. At the same level, branches show first, nodes show last. (How big? Well, mid-scale. Number of records may range from hundreds to tens of thousands)
I could implement "Lazy Loading" whenever a branch is opened, like most lazy loading trees do. Yet, this branch may contain several tens of thousands of branches and/or tree nodes. This explains why I needed endless scrolling as well.
You can imagine that this problem gets complicated when "Endless Scrolling" joins in. The key to basic endless scrolling is to always keep track of which last record is shown. For the tree's case, however, I at least need to keep track of one extra thing, i.e. whether I am endlessly scrolling branches or nodes.
But still, "Endless Scrolling" has to support nodes located at any level deep.
The presentation also gets complicated. Here's to visualize.
Root 1 -- branch 1 -- N number of nodes ... ... (endless scrolling happening) ... -- branch 2 -- branch 3
Root 1 is opened, all sub-branches 1, 2, 3 are loaded. You can imagine the problem after opening branch 1 with thousands of items in it: In theory I can't scroll down to branch 2 until I've loaded (or triggered) everything within branch 1. IMHO, not a good experience for the user either.
I could perhaps detect how many "rows" there are under branch 1 when it gets opened, and first create the height needed. Maybe that's one way.
I also welcome ideas of design alternatives, but the primary constraints are, no JavaScript frameworks used, it has to be in one tree, and these information has to go into the tree, I can't have a tree only containing branches where the nodes are loaded into a separate view.Started By Terry Young on Jul 24, 2009 at 1:21:07 AM |  | | 5 Response(s) | Reply |
| View All Replies |  | | Terry Young on Jul 26, 2009 at 6:40:36 PM Yes, that is one of the practical options I am so tempted to use, yet I am also struggling so hard to avoid: A Web-1.0 "Prev/Next Page" user experience. The less clicks required the better (which was the point of endless scrolling)
Perhaps it's possible that under every branch, I wrap all "nodes only" with a scrollable DIV (without scrollbars), and onmouseover-ing the "shape" it endelessly scrolls that inner DIV (not the whole tree), and onclick it could load ALL nodes under that branch. The main scrollbar would still scroll the entire tree as a whole.
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