Overhead for table columns.

[Tomas Mikula]

I like this kind of being wrong :-)

Tomas

On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 12:42 AM, Jonathan Giles
<jonathan.giles at oracle.com> wrote:
> Actually this is slightly wrong. I was holding off replying until I had a
> bit more time to be thorough, but I'll respond now to prevent this
> misunderstanding from being discussed :-)
>
> It _is_ possible to virtualise the TableView in both directions. This
> doesn't necessarily help with the overhead entirely, but it should help
> substantially. I might be forgetting some important element as I have not
> referred back to the code, but I believe that the only thing that is
> necessary is for the developer to set a fixed cell size on the TableView
> (via TableView#setFixedCellSize). When this happens, the TableView can 1)
> reduce enormously the amount of computations it has to do for layout and 2)
> virtualise the columns. I suspect 2 is your primary goal, but 1 shouldn't be
> underestimated given the enormity of your table.
>
> Sean, it would be interesting if you could send me a sample application that
> demonstrates your problem. I am always trying to optimise these virtualised
> controls and would appreciate adding your specific use case to my suite of
> tests.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -- Jonathan
>
>
> On 15/08/2014 10:35 a.m., Tomas Mikula wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 9:01 PM, Sean True <sean.true at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> We've been looking at very large tables for use in data grid display.
>>>
>>> Row count scales very nicely indeed, but column count is much more
>>> problematic.
>>
>> To explain your observation: TableView is based on VirtualFlow, which
>> optimizes the number of cells simultaneously attached to the scene
>> graph in one direction (horizontal or vertical). For TableView,
>> vertical VirtualFlow is used, which means rows are optimized
>> (invisible rows are not in the scene graph), while all columns for
>> each visible row are in the scene graph.
>>
>> To be able to scroll smoothly through the table, you would want a
>> two-dimensional virtual flow. You can look at VirtualFlow.java from
>> OpenJFX or from my alternative virtual flow implementation Flowless
>> [1] to get an idea about the complexity of the one-dimensional case.
>>
>> If you don't require smooth scrolling and are fine with scroll by one
>> row/column at a time, you could display a small table with fixed cell
>> count, say 30x20 (maybe calculated dynamically based on the available
>> area), and display your own scrollbars that will update the data model
>> behind this small table. Not the best solution, but much less work.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Tomas
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/TomasMikula/Flowless
>>
>>> In the March time frame, our tests showed that each column had
>>> approximately 100KB overhead (using VisualVM), which is negligible at 100
>>> columns, but at 10,000 columns becomes an issue. We have real world use
>>> cases of more columns than that .
>>>
>>> Is there planned effort to reduce the overhead, or are we looking at
>>> likely
>>> having to build our own table component to serve these large needs?
>>>
>>> -- Sean
>
>