Asp.net Initial data in pull in UpdatePanel

Question

I have a dropdown list which gets populated from an odata service in Page_Load. The dropdown list resides in an UpdatePanel control.

Currently the page does not load until the dropdown list is populated.

How can I make it so that the page loads initially and then keeps populating the dropdown list in the background?

Answer 1

Do not load the DDL in Page_Load

Let the blank DDL get rendered on the client side, then use AJAX or JavaScript to fetch records from the server and add them to the DDL.