When will activewidgets use AJAX?

Active widgets amazing. But I think that someone should write a module that saves the grids back. Just like AJAX (http://www.ajaxian.com or http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php )
If these widgets do that, that will be amazing and amazing.

Editable grid will be available with the next version (2.0)

http://www.activewidgets.com/general.faq.releases/2-0.html

You can force the current version doing this as well, and send the data back with XML data model:

http://www.activewidgets.com/javascript.forum.1394.47/textbox-template-edit-on-double.html

Check out this openrico.org. Their grid (livegrid) is built for Ajax and can handle huge amts of data without paging
Its really open source comes with an Apache license!!
Form the Sabre team
Goodbye ALEX

Simon,
Did you really take a close look at their 'grid'? It's not a grid, it's a simple table! They wrote some routines that will fetch data and stuff it into the table cells. You can do that with the ActiveWidget grid and you get the added benefit of a REAL GRID! Apply a little thought to this and you will see that it's not all that hard to control the data in the grid. You can add/remove data on the fly and keep the number of rows in memory to a minimum. It is fast and I think the AW grid is far superior to the OpenRico one. AJAX is a buzzword for a technique to get data from the server without doing a page refresh. Use the Active.HTTP.Request object and you too can communicate to your server behind the sceenes to change the data of the grid on the fly. Don't be fooled by what you see on the surface of the OpenRico web site, look at the underlying code and judge for yourself.

The ActiveWidget grid is an AJAX grid. In fact, we use its Active.HTTP.Request object for more than the grid - we actually use it to populate forms and save the data back to the server without a page refresh. Alex made an AJAX grid before anyone even knew it had a name.

Alex, how difficult would it be to add the type of paging capabilities that OpenRico has in their grid? I actually think its a great feature.

I like Rico. Mostly because it makes you feel like all these nice little things are very simple. So this is surely the right way - no visible complexity, things 'just work'...

I was planning to implement this type of paging/data retrieval from the start, but it is still something left for the future - version 2.0 will not have it.

Alex,
I appreciate your admiration for keeping things simple. We realize that the LiveGrid in Rico is currently very minimalistic in terms of features. It concentrates its core on the key idea that the client should be thin and that the content will be managed on the server. We will be adding new features to Rico's table (LiveGrid) to support many of the expected features.

The LiveGrid is really trying to address the need for representing thousands of rows and having operations that are scalable regardless of how many rows are being represented.

I am kind of curious how ActiveGrid will evolve to support very large number of records. Your home page specifies client level sorting as a feature. I assume that feature predates the idea of incorporating AJAX to manage large data sets that would be prohibitive to download to a client.


If you are interested, I will be posting information on soon to be release features in LiveGrid and other Rico components on http://richardcowin.typepad.com/

Hello

I have worked with AJAX for this grid. This works very nice. have a look at CPAINT for AJAX and work with that. Return data in xml string format and then use it with this grid which gives ultimate performance. AS well as all features of grid. Right now I'm working with lie grid which will work with Grid and AJAX.

Must have a look at CPAINT for Ajax.

Thanks

Hi Pat

I'm interested in using cpaint for "seamless" access to a database, and presenting results in the grid.

I'm trying to understand how to get cpaint to produce return xml data in a form suitable for the grid.

In early stages of playing with the grid and cpaint, I have so far generated xml as a "data island" using php access to a database i.e. simply using php echo statements to output an xml structure; the grid then uses this data OK later in the same file.

As far as I understand it cpaint produces xml as an xml dom nodelist object (I have got some basic cpaint examples going). I wonder if you can help me in figuring out how do I then get this into a kind of xml string format suitable for using in the grid as above?

The virtual rendering mode in the new version certainly seems very impressive in terms of performance of the grid, but if possible i would still like an ajax type connection to the database so that filtering, searching etc.. can be done very smoothly - at least that what i'm hoping!

Thanks in advance
Will

Alex,

Is there any word about when you will be adding the Ajax paging functionality? I am eagerly waiting for that :) Thanks.

Joe