Gridview and Column sets

Question

I have a Gridview that is data bound to an array of objects, with a ton of properties attached to them. The grid would need to be too wide to show all of them at once (and also overwhelming for the user), so I'd like to have some link buttons that post back to the server and show different sets of columns (all from this same data set array of objects), based on what "tab" the user clicked.

In the GridView I use TemplateFields to bind the columns to the object properties. What would be the best way to implement the different columns and views?

1. Should I just bind all the data, and then on the post back event for a tab press, show and hide only the columns I need for that tab? This seems like since it would be binding a lot more data than I am showing, that it might be unnecessarily slow.

2. Should I dynamically create the columns before the binding, and only create the columns and bind the data for the columns I want to show? What is the performance hit the page would take for dynamically creating the columns each time based on which tab was pressed?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you have that many columns, you may want to think about using a different control instead of a gridview. A DetailsView with paging would probably render better and be more manageable for the users. To answer your question, though, I don't believe option 1 would be that much of a performance hit. And I believe that option would be less strenuous than option 2. That mostly my opinion, though.