Please suggest appropriate JavaScript-emulated scrollbar
Hello,
I am developing an app that has reporting engine in it. It might generate reports, basically HTML tables, containing several thousand rows.
Right now the engine features classic paging control: buttons 20 nearest page links, jump-to-page, previous/next page. I'd like to replace this cumbersome paging with a scrollbar. Thing is, I don't want to generate and stream to the user all the thousands of rows, but want to implement a smart updating mechanism, that would make the user feel as the content is really there, and any location in the list is accessible by scrolling to it (by dragging the scrollbar handle to the location).
Here's my ideal plan: the scrollbar should be just like the classic srollbar: it would feature up/down buttons, draggable handle, would know how to page up/down, if user clicks in the area between the handle and up/down buttons, and would work with mouse scrollwheel. I'd initialize the scrollbar by telling it the min value (0) and max value (N-P), where N = number of rows in the report, and P = number or records that are visible in the viewport. I'd attach an event handler to the "onChange" event that would update the viewport with someting like "loading, please wait", and if the scrollbar value does not change for 1 second, then an AJAX call would be performed to load the data to be displayed. Of course, I'd implement some data caching to minimise the traffic, but that is all details.
And, last, but not least, since I use jQuery framework, I believe this dream scrollbar uses jQuery features to gain the necessary level of functionality and compatibility. What is the reason why I ask this question in this forum.
Thanks for any suggestions!