Performance issues with declarative binding to DropDownList

[Nicholas]

Hi,

I'm attempting to make a grid (with batch editing mode set) always display the editor for a DropDownList column -- not just when the user clicks in the cell to enter edit mode. It seems that the only way to do this is via declarative binding with a ClientTemplate set for the field.

I've gotten it to work, but performance is quite poor when first initializing the grid, and when scrolling to a new page (with virtual scrolling on). Is there a quicker way to achieve this, or is the initialization process of the kendoDropDownList simply too heavy to be done for this many items at once?

Here is a jsfiddle that shows the issue:

http://jsfiddle.net/e983a/1/

Thanks,
Nick

[Kiril Nikolov]

Hi Nicholas,

You are right that the way to achieve this is by using client template. However rendering 100+ widgets on the same page is resource consuming operation and the delay that you see is someway expect. Reducing the pageSize will improve the performance, so if your project requirements allow it, please consider it as a performance enhancer. 

Regards,
Kiril Nikolov
Telerik

[Nicholas]

Ok, thanks. Reducing the PageSize isn't really an option in our case so we'll look at other options to make editable fields more clear to the user (while keeping the default behavior).

I'm a little surprised that creating 50 dropdowns was enough to slow it down to this extent -- maybe room for improvement there in a future release? We're currently migrating an older application built using RadControls to Kendo, and I don't recall running into this issue with RadDropDownList.

[Kiril Nikolov]

Hello Nicholas,

We are constantly working on improving the performance of Kendo UI, however 100 dropdowns inside a Grid is a huge amount of JavaScript widgets in a browser.

Regards,
Kiril Nikolov
Telerik