ASP.NET (MVC) - Drill down with hash

Question

I'm currently working on a drilldown filter in MVC but I don't really know how to make this the fastest and most flexible as possible.

click here

Now my question is, how do you think they are doing this? I've really no idea how to make this kind of drilldown but it seems they use some kind of hash they save for quick querying.

Maybe (pseudo)code anyone?

Answer 1

The answer after carefull looking at how they do it:

1. They send a normal http POST to the server with a querystring of all choices.
2. The server sends back a http GET which returns an URL with the hash.
3. The server caches the hash with the query so the next time the query is called it is faster.

Thanks everyone for your "usefull" responses.

Answer 2

If you're willing to give up a little browser compatibility (it won't work on ancient and some console only browsers but then again neither will anything else), jQuery DataTables is a great way to make drilldowns.

Here is the main site, and Here is a good example of using a dropdown select to filter.

Basically all you have to do is throw all the data into a large <table> and use javascript on the client side to filter. The big benefit is there is no latency when you make a selection, unlike the site you linked.

Answer 3

I think it is not a good idea to put all data on the client side. It is more reasonable to trust the data filtering to the database server (of couse it depends on your data size).
To speed up receiving the filtered data you can save it in your cache server with hash or select query as tag. Query to cache is faster than to database.