I have a gridview with about 300-400 rows that I use for reporting; it needs paging and requires sorting. My choice is between these two options: a) load the 300-400 in one query and let the gridview do the paging and sorting; b) handle the paging/sorting at the data source level. I know that b) is going to be better/faster/more efficient... In my context, I'm looking to get something done relatively fast; if I choose a), will the page seem incredibly/painfully slow?
Thanks.
Use the builtin functions of the GridView and load the whole data at one go. It wouldn't be worth the effort to implement paging in database(f.e. with RowNumber) when your number of records is such small, especially because you mentioned that you are looking for a fast solution. When you enable paging in GridView the performance will suffice.
read Scott Guthrie's excellent article about paging.
How to implement a data-result search page built with ASP.NET 2.0 and Atlas that can present hundreds of thousands of row results using the ASP.NET 2.0 GridView control. The results are formatted using a “paging” based UI model – where 15 results per page are displayed, and the user can skip from page to page to see their data. For kicks I also added support for editing and deleting each individual row.
Although 300-400 rows isn't a particularly large set of data, I would certainly vote for option B since it will definitely be more scalable. Once you start getting massive sets of data, loading all of it with one query and having the GridView handle the paging will end up being incredibly slow. The better option is to, like you said, only query the data you need for each page.
However, if you aren't going to have data sets larger than 300-400 records, you probably don't need to be too concerned about load times, but again, the key is in scalability.
