Seeking Design Suggestion/Recommendation

Jack posted on Friday, April 10, 2009

I have a large list of picklist data (subjects in a study) that I need to display to the user so they can scroll through and select the data they need.  This picklist data contains some basic organization information (ID, Name, Type, Status) as well as info/status/warning etc that they can use as jumping points to other actions.

Anyhow depending on how I group/filter/sort I have a bunch of different hierarchical list views that I'm trying to manage.  I need to give the users some flexibility in how they want to view/manage the data but I'm trying to put together a starting point and a simple design that works going forward.

My previous version of the software just displayed a tree broken out by status (All/New/Active/Dropped/Completed) which essentially managed the lifetime of the subject.  It was okay but not great and was lousy for when the user changed the status as I had to rebuild/refresh the tree and find the new node and all that junk.

What I wanted to do this time was dynamically retrieve the data in chunks and append to a master list.  The master list would then be broken up in to umpteen different lists (via LINQ) to support all the different user views.  If the grouping data changed then the lists would all rebuild appropriately.  Not all LINQ based views would be retrievable, some would just be data related based on the data already retrieved.

I currently don't need to worry too much about the numbers in the list, for this project it isn't going to be more than 500 or so but I have a potential customer that manages 10k+ records. 

There are a few groups that I always need up front (New & Active) but I was also going to add a MRU list which I would retrieve up front.  This helps breakdown the size of the list into more manageable chunks.  My New.Active group is really the current workset that users are likely to access most of the time.  If the Active list gets too big for a fast retrieve / display then I'll have to start breaking it down as well.

My thought was to add a bunch of command objects to go and retrieve the data I needed and append it to the master list ROBL.  If the user did an action that ultimately refreshed the data then I would just let the database work complete and then trigger a command to refresh the individual item.

Does anybody do anything similar or have any suggestions on what does and doesn't work.  For the UI I was thinking of using an expanded panel bar or something (like outlook) so its easy to manage the groups.

Thanks

jack