Load on Demand and Drill Down, Two New Features to Make Your ASP.NET AJAX OrgChart More Interactive

The organizational chart is one of the newest controls in Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX suite and because of this we know how important it is not only to improve existing functionalities but to add new ones regularly. With Q2 2012 Telerik’s ASP.NET OrgChart control features’ collection was extended once again. I am happy to announce that two major capabilities were introduced which significantly improve the OrgChart’s performance and usability.

• Load on Demand
• Drill Down

Load on Demand

With Q1 2012 Node and Group collapsing came out. Load on demand continues the sequence in a logical way. Keeping the idea of different type of collapsing (Nodes/Groups), the load on demand allows the users to load on demand only Nodes, only Groups or even both.

See Demo

The expanded Nodes/Groups are loaded via callbacks. In order to use the load on demand functionality you should set the RadOrgChart.LoadOnDemand property. Along with it we decided to:

• persist the expand/collapse state on postbacks
• expose server side events to update the underlying data source.

Drill Down

With Drill Drown the user has the ability to observe a particular sub tree of the organizational chart and navigate to its parent or to the root node. The drill down feature is enabled with a single property. Just set RadOrgChart.DrillDown to true.

See Demo

Drill Down is compatible with all of the features of the OrgChart control. In case that it is combined with RadOrgChart.MaxBindDepth = 4 (maximum depth of the data binding) and the user drills on a Node, the next four levels of the hierarchy will be shown. No more levels will be visualized. Check the DrillDown With Breadcrumb demo to better see how it works.

What is on the horizon?

The web is getting more and more web-service oriented and web-service binding is obligatory for our organizational chart in Q3’12. We are also going to emphasize on enhancements for better experience on mobile devices.

As always, we are interested to hear your feedback. Leave a comment here to let us know if there are other features you’d like to see implemented in the ASP.NET AJAX OrgChart control.