how to display an extremely large document
I'm building a site to support a very large outline of legal cases. There are thousands of nodes in the outline, each with a very small amount of text. The outline is about 5 or 6 levels deep. I've written some code to import the outline into the book module. So the book hierarchy reflects the outline and the node bodies contain these small chunks of text. I'd like to display the entire outline in a single page. This is not practical because of the overall size. Still I'd like the user to feel as if they are scrolling through the entire thing, not visiting thousands of different pages. My idea is to use AJAX to accomplish this. Imagine how google maps works (start somewhere but scroll to anywhere, use ajax to refresh the view after the scroll). I'd like the same thing for arbitrary HTML. In other words the browser starts with mostly placeholder divs and a small amount of content. As the user scrolls around, the placeholders get replaced with real content. And the real content which scrolls out of view gets cleaned up so the browser does not run out of memory. Has anyone encountered such a thing? Or would be interested in collaborating on it? Any reason why it would not work? Thanks, -Dave
I haven't seen anything done like this in Drupal (not saying something doesn't exist that I just missed), but a good example would actually be Google Reader. It loads content as you scroll the window down through AJAX. I have actually thought about using this on sites that get a bunch of comments. Load say 50 at a time, then have the next 50 auto-load as the user gets closer to the bottom of the page. Jamie Holly David Cohen wrote:
I'm building a site to support a very large outline of legal cases. There are thousands of nodes in the outline, each with a very small amount of text. The outline is about 5 or 6 levels deep. I've written some code to import the outline into the book module. So the book hierarchy reflects the outline and the node bodies contain these small chunks of text.
I'd like to display the entire outline in a single page. This is not practical because of the overall size. Still I'd like the user to feel as if they are scrolling through the entire thing, not visiting thousands of different pages.
My idea is to use AJAX to accomplish this. Imagine how google maps works (start somewhere but scroll to anywhere, use ajax to refresh the view after the scroll). I'd like the same thing for arbitrary HTML. In other words the browser starts with mostly placeholder divs and a small amount of content. As the user scrolls around, the placeholders get replaced with real content. And the real content which scrolls out of view gets cleaned up so the browser does not run out of memory.
Has anyone encountered such a thing? Or would be interested in collaborating on it? Any reason why it would not work?
Thanks,
-Dave
You could try this tutorial - http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/load-content-while-scrolling-with-jquery/ - it implements infinite scrolling with jquery. It's ASP, but shouldn't be too difficult to get something like this working in Drupal. I haven't tried it myself, so I don't know whether it's doable. 2009/1/26 Jamie Holly <hovercrafter@earthlink.net>
I haven't seen anything done like this in Drupal (not saying something doesn't exist that I just missed), but a good example would actually be Google Reader. It loads content as you scroll the window down through AJAX. I have actually thought about using this on sites that get a bunch of comments. Load say 50 at a time, then have the next 50 auto-load as the user gets closer to the bottom of the page.
Jamie Holly
David Cohen wrote:
I'm building a site to support a very large outline of legal cases. There are thousands of nodes in the outline, each with a very small amount of text. The outline is about 5 or 6 levels deep. I've written some code to import the outline into the book module. So the book hierarchy reflects the outline and the node bodies contain these small chunks of text.
I'd like to display the entire outline in a single page. This is not practical because of the overall size. Still I'd like the user to feel as if they are scrolling through the entire thing, not visiting thousands of different pages.
My idea is to use AJAX to accomplish this. Imagine how google maps works (start somewhere but scroll to anywhere, use ajax to refresh the view after the scroll). I'd like the same thing for arbitrary HTML. In other words the browser starts with mostly placeholder divs and a small amount of content. As the user scrolls around, the placeholders get replaced with real content. And the real content which scrolls out of view gets cleaned up so the browser does not run out of memory.
Has anyone encountered such a thing? Or would be interested in collaborating on it? Any reason why it would not work?
Thanks,
-Dave
Quoting Jamie Holly <hovercrafter@earthlink.net>:
I haven't seen anything done like this in Drupal (not saying something doesn't exist that I just missed), but a good example would actually be Google Reader. It loads content as you scroll the window down through AJAX. I have actually thought about using this on sites that get a bunch of comments. Load say 50 at a time, then have the next 50 auto-load as the user gets closer to the bottom of the page.
Jamie, you probably want panels and views.
Jamie Holly
David Cohen wrote:
I'm building a site to support a very large outline of legal cases. There are thousands of nodes in the outline, each with a very small amount of text. The outline is about 5 or 6 levels deep. I've written some code to import the outline into the book module. So the book hierarchy reflects the outline and the node bodies contain these small chunks of text.
I've used http://drupal.org/project/relativity to create outlines. It allows you to associate existing nodes to the relative mapping or create new children.
I'd like to display the entire outline in a single page. This is not practical because of the overall size. Still I'd like the user to feel as if they are scrolling through the entire thing, not visiting thousands of different pages.
It doesn't display on a single page but you can create a menu of items and the page presents child and parent links.
My idea is to use AJAX to accomplish this. Imagine how google maps works (start somewhere but scroll to anywhere, use ajax to refresh the view after the scroll). I'd like the same thing for arbitrary HTML. In other words the browser starts with mostly placeholder divs and a small amount of content. As the user scrolls around, the placeholders get replaced with real content. And the real content which scrolls out of view gets cleaned up so the browser does not run out of memory.
I haven't attempted using AJAX. It may be possible to create a view from the relative mapping table and show the outline in a panel.
Has anyone encountered such a thing? Or would be interested in collaborating on it? Any reason why it would not work?
I don't no of any reason why it shouldn't work. -- Earnie http://r-feed.com Make a Drupal difference and review core patches. -- http://for-my-kids.com/ -- http://give-me-an-offer.com/
http://drupal.org/project/endless_page __________________ Michael Prasuhn mike@mikeyp.net http://mikeyp.net
participants (5)
-
Ben Steele -
David Cohen -
Earnie Boyd -
Jamie Holly -
Michael Prasuhn