IE8 select population performance issues - solutions needed - html

I have an application that is having issue when populating selects with over 100 items. This problem only occurs in IE8. I am using angularjs to do the population, but my research shows that this is a general problem with IE8. What solutions have others used to deal with this problem. We have over 40,000 users tied to IE8 for the foreseeable future (Fortune 200 company) so moving to another browser is not an option.
Some thoughts I had.
Create a series of option tags as a one long string in memory and replace the innerHTML of the . But running some people samples this does not appear to solve the issue.
Originally populating the select with a few and then adding the rest as the user scrolls down. I am not sure if this is possible, or how to implement this
I am sure others have run into this issue. Does anyone have some ideas?
Thanks,
Jerry

Another solution that preserves the original <select> is to set the <option> values after adding the options to the <select>.
Theory
Add the <option> elements to a document fragment.
Add the document fragment to the <select>.
Set the value for each <option>.
Practice
In practice we end up with a couple issues we have to work around to get this to work:
IE11 is very slow when setting the value for each individual <option>.
IE8 has selection bugs because it isn't properly doing a re-flow/layout on the <select>.
Result
To handle these what we really do is something like the following:
Add the <option> tags to a document fragment. Make sure to set the values so that step 3 is a no-op in IE11.
Add the document fragment to the <select>.
Set the value for each <option>. In IE8 this will set the values, in IE11 this is a no-op.
In a setTimeout add and remove a dummy <option>. This forces a re-flow.
Code
function setSelectOptions(select, options)
{
select.innerHTML = ''; // Blank the list.
// 1. Add the options to a document fragment.
var docFrag = document.createDocumentFragement();
for (var i = 0; i < options.length; i++)
{
var opt = document.createElement('option');
opt.text = options[i];
docFrag.appendChild(opt);
}
// 2. Add the document fragment to the select.
select.appendChild(docFrag);
// 3. Set the option values for IE8. This is a no-op in IE11.
for (i = 0; i < options.length; i++)
select.options[i].text = options[i];
// 4. Force a re-flow/layout to fix IE8 selection bugs.
window.setTimeout(function()
{
select.add(document.createElement('option'));
select.remove(select.options.length - 1);
}, 0);
}

The best solution seems to be to create the Select and it's options as a text string and add that string as the innerHTML of the containing tag such as a DIV. Below is some code.
<div id="selectHome" ></div>
In JS (from angular controller)
function insertSelect(divForSelect) {
var str = "<select id='myselect'>";
for (var i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
str += '<option>' + data[i] + '</data>';
}
str += '</select>';
divForSelect.innnerHTML = str;
}
Note that inserting options into a existing Select is very slow (8,000 msecs for 2000 items). But, if the select and the options are inserted as a single string it is very fast (12 msec for 2000 items).

Related

Microsoft edge multi element copy

Does anyone know a fast way to copy multiple elements from an inspect page?
What I mean by that is I have a number of elements with same qualities i.e. same class and I want to copy all of them to my clipboard. Is there a way within inspect tool to do such a "trick" ? :)
Thank you in advance!
There's no specific simple way to do this, you can only using code to extract the elements you want.
For example if you want to get elements with the same class name, you can use the following code:
var outputText = "";
var targets = document.getElementsByClassName('classname');
for( var i = 0; i < targets.length; i++ ) {
outputText += targets[i].outerHTML;
}
console.log(outputText);
Then you can copy the output in the console.

Vertical html table without repeating th tags

I'm generating a table using xslt, but for this question I'll keep that side out of it, as it relates more to the actual generated structure of a html table.
What I do is make a vertical table as follows, which suits the layout needed for the data concerned that originated in a spreadsheet. Example is contrived for brevity, actual data fields contain lengthy strings and many more fields.
Title: something or rather bla bla
Description: very long desription
Field1: asdfasdfasdfsdfsd
Field2: asdfasfasdfasdfsdfjasdlfksdjaflk
Title: another title
Description: another description
Field1:
Field2: my previous field was blank but this one is not, anyways
etc.
The only way so far I found to generate such a html table is using repeating tags for every field and every record e.g.:
<tr><th>Title</th><td>something or rather bla bla</td></tr>
<tr><th>Description</th><td>very long desription</td></tr>
...
<tr><th>Title</th><td>another title</td></tr>
<tr><th>Description</th><td>another description</td></tr>
...
Of course this is semantically incorrect but produces correct visual layout. I need it to be semantically correct html, as that's the only sane way of later attaching a filtering javascript facility.
The following correct semantically produces an extremely wide table with a single set of field headers on the left:
<tr><th>Title</th><td>something or rather bla bla</td><td>another title</td></tr>
<tr><th>Description</th><td>very long desription</td><td>another description</td></tr>
...
So to summarise, need a html table (or other html structure) where it's one record under another (visually) with repeating field headers, but the field headers must not be repeated in actual code because that would wreck any record based filtering to be added later on.
Yo. Thanks for updating your question, and including some code. Typically you'd also post what you've tried to correct this issue - but I'm satisfied enough with this post.
Since you want the repeating headers in vertical layout (not something I've seen often, but I can understand the desire), you don't have to modify the HTML formatting, just use a bit more JavaScript to figure it out. I haven't gone through and checked to see if I'm doing things efficiently (I'm probably not, since there are so many loops), but in my testing the following can attach to a vertical table and filter using a couple variables to indicate how many rows there are in each entry.
Firstly, here's the HTML I'm testing this one with. Notice I have a div with the id of filters, and each of my filter inputs has a custom attribute named filter that matches the header of the rows they are supposed to filter:
<div id='filters'>
Title: <input filter='Title'><br>
Desc: <input filter='Description'>
</div>
<table>
<tr><th>Title</th><td>abcd</td></tr>
<tr><th>Description</th><td>efgh</td></tr>
<tr><th>Title</th><td>ijkl</td></tr>
<tr><th>Description</th><td>mnop</td></tr>
<tr><th>Title</th><td>ijkl</td></tr>
<tr><th>Description</th><td>mdep</td></tr>
<tr><th>Title</th><td>ijkl</td></tr>
<tr><th>Description</th><td>mnop</td></tr>
<tr><th>Title</th><td>ijkl</td></tr>
<tr><th>Description</th><td>mnop</td></tr>
</table>
Here are the variables I use at the start:
var filterTable = $('table');
var rowsPerEntry = 2;
var totalEntries = filterTable.find('tbody tr').size() / rowsPerEntry;
var currentEntryNumber = 1;
var currentRowInEntry = 0;
And this little loop will add a class for each entry (based on the rowsPerEntry as seen above) to group the rows together (this way all rows for an entry can be selected together with a class selector in jQuery):
filterTable.find('tbody tr').each(function(){
$(this).addClass('entry' + currentEntryNumber);
currentRowInEntry += 1;
if(currentRowInEntry == rowsPerEntry){
currentRowInEntry = 0;
currentEntryNumber += 1;
}
});
And the magic; on keyup for the filters run a loop through the total number of entries, then a nested loop through the filters to determine if that entry does not match either filter's input. If either field for the entry does not match the corresponding filter value, then we add the entry number to our hide array and move along. Once we've determined which entries should be hidden, we can show all of the entries, and hide the specific ones that should be hidden:
$('#filters input').keyup(function(){
var hide = [];
for(var i = 0; i < totalEntries; i++){
var entryNumber = i + 1;
if($.inArray(entryNumber, hide) == -1){
$('#filters input').each(function(){
var val = $(this).val().toLowerCase();
var fHeader = $(this).attr('filter');
var fRow = $('.entry' + entryNumber + ' th:contains(' + fHeader + ')').closest('tr');
if(fRow.find('td').text().toLowerCase().indexOf(val) == -1){
hide.push(entryNumber);
return false;
}
});
}
}
filterTable.find('tbody tr').show();
$.each(hide, function(k, v){
filterTable.find('.entry' + v).hide();
});
});
It's no masterpiece, but I hope it'll get you started down the right path.
Here's a fiddle too: https://jsfiddle.net/bzjyfejc/

highlight words in html using regex & javascript - almost there

I am writing a jquery plugin that will do a browser-style find-on-page search. I need to improve the search, but don't want to get into parsing the html quite yet.
At the moment my approach is to take an entire DOM element and all nested elements and simply run a regex find/replace for a given term. In the replace I will simply wrap a span around the matched term and use that span as my anchor to do highlighting, scrolling, etc. It is vital that no characters inside any html tags are matched.
This is as close as I have gotten:
(?<=^|>)([^><].*?)(?=<|$)
It does a very good job of capturing all characters that are not in an html tag, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to insert my search term.
Input: Any html element (this could be quite large, eg <body>)
Search Term: 1 or more characters
Replace Txt: <span class='highlight'>$1</span>
UPDATE
The following regex does what I want when I'm testing with http://gskinner.com/RegExr/...
Regex: (?<=^|>)(.*?)(SEARCH_STRING)(?=.*?<|$)
Replacement: $1<span class='highlight'>$2</span>
However I am having some trouble using it in my javascript. With the following code chrome is giving me the error "Invalid regular expression: /(?<=^|>)(.?)(Mary)(?=.?<|$)/: Invalid group".
var origText = $('#'+opt.targetElements).data('origText');
var regx = new RegExp("(?<=^|>)(.*?)(" + $this.val() + ")(?=.*?<|$)", 'gi');
$('#'+opt.targetElements).each(function() {
var text = origText.replace(regx, '$1<span class="' + opt.resultClass + '">$2</span>');
$(this).html(text);
});
It's breaking on the group (?<=^|>) - is this something clumsy or a difference in the Regex engines?
UPDATE
The reason this regex is breaking on that group is because Javascript does not support regex lookbehinds. For reference & possible solutions: http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/mimic-lookbehind-javascript.
Just use jQuerys built-in text() method. It will return all the characters in a selected DOM element.
For the DOM approach (docs for the Node interface): Run over all child nodes of an element. If the child is an element node, run recursively. If it's a text node, search in the text (node.data) and if you want to highlight/change something, shorten the text of the node until the found position, and insert a highligth-span with the matched text and another text node for the rest of the text.
Example code (adjusted, origin is here):
(function iterate_node(node) {
if (node.nodeType === 3) { // Node.TEXT_NODE
var text = node.data,
pos = text.search(/any regular expression/g), //indexOf also applicable
length = 5; // or whatever you found
if (pos > -1) {
node.data = text.substr(0, pos); // split into a part before...
var rest = document.createTextNode(text.substr(pos+length)); // a part after
var highlight = document.createElement("span"); // and a part between
highlight.className = "highlight";
highlight.appendChild(document.createTextNode(text.substr(pos, length)));
node.parentNode.insertBefore(rest, node.nextSibling); // insert after
node.parentNode.insertBefore(highlight, node.nextSibling);
iterate_node(rest); // maybe there are more matches
}
} else if (node.nodeType === 1) { // Node.ELEMENT_NODE
for (var i = 0; i < node.childNodes.length; i++) {
iterate_node(node.childNodes[i]); // run recursive on DOM
}
}
})(content); // any dom node
There's also highlight.js, which might be exactly what you want.

Problems with accessing DOM tree

I'm developing a simple Chrome extension, which should be able to retrieve a DOM nodes and modify them in the specific way. And this is what I'm stuck with.
There are two DOM queries (lets call the A and B) in a javascript file, that i inject in html-page. The first one (A) goes well, but the second one (B) always crushes. Even If I interchange the first (A) query and second one (B), everything will still work in the same way. Query (B) now works as it should in the first place, and A now does nothing.
spans = document.getElementsByTagName('span');
for(j =0 ;j<=divin.length; j++)
{
//Manipulations //Works just fine
}
paragraphs = document.getElementsByTagName('p');
for(j =0 ;j<=paragraphs.length; j++)
{
//Manipulations //Does nothing
}
And what we see here. The same code, but different position.
paragraphs = document.getElementsByTagName('p');
for(j =0 ;j<=paragraphs.length; j++)
{
//Manipulations //Works just fine
}
spans = document.getElementsByTagName('span');
for(j =0 ;j<=divin.length; j++)
{
//Manipulations //Does nothing
}
I tried every way of injecting this code, but result was always the same.
Seems like you're using divin.length instead of spans.length.

Re-stacking MovieClips in an Array

I was trying to make a similar thing with the game SameGame (ie. the block above the removed blocks fall downward). Before trying this with an Array that contains MovieClips, this code worked (tried it with int values). With MovieClips on the array, it seems not working the same way.
With int values, example:
popUp(0, 4): Before: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10; After: 1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9,10
But with MovieClips:
popUp(0, 4): Before: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10; After; 1,2,3,4
// Assume the numbers are movieclips XD
Basically, it strips everything else, rather than just the said block >_<
Here's the whole method. Basically, two extra arrays juggle the values above the soon-to-be removed value, remove the value, then re-stack it to the original array.
What could be wrong with this? And am I doing the right thing for what I really wanted to emulate?
function popUp(col:uint, row:uint)
{
var tempStack:Array = new Array();
var extraStack:Array = new Array();
tempStack = IndexArray[col];
removeChild(tempStack[0]);
for(var ctr:uint = tempStack.length-(row+1); ctr > 0; ctr--)
{
removeChild(tempStack[ctr]);
extraStack.push(tempStack.pop());
trace(extraStack);
}
tempStack.pop();
for(ctr = extraStack.length; ctr > 0; ctr--)
{
tempStack.push(extraStack.pop());
//addChild(tempStack[ctr]);
}
IndexArray[col] = tempStack;
}
PS: If it's not too much to ask, are there free step-by-step guides on making a SameGame in AS3 (I fear I might not be doing things right)? Thanks in advance =)
I think you just want to remove an element and have everything after that index shift down a place to fill what you removed. There's an inbuilt function for this called splice(start:uint, length:uint);
Parameters:
start - the index to start removing elements from
length - the amount of elements to remove
var ar:Array = ["hello","there","sir"];
ar.splice(1, 1);
ar is now -> ["hello", "sir"];
As per question:
Here's an example with different types of elements:
var ar:Array = [new MovieClip(), "some string", new Sprite(), 8];
ar.splice(2, 1);
trace(ar); // [object MovieClip], some string, 8
And further example to display the indexes being changed:
trace(ar[2]); // was [object Sprite], is now 8