Implementing scrollable table on Windows Phone

Question

I need to create an app for TV guide. Requirement is that UI must be a copy of one you can see here: raspored.bnet.hr. As you can see, there's a lot of data. So, basically it would be a large scrollable table. Since there is no such UI control as table on Windows Phone, I found out that the best approach would be to create one vertical listbox with horizontal listboxes as its items. This is all ok and I'm able to create it. But, to make it behave like a table I also need to make these horizontal listboxes scroll in sync, not to scroll one row at a time. Then I disabled horizontal scroll on horizontal listboxes, and enabled it on the parent (vertical) listbox and while it gave the result I wanted to achieve one big problem came up - UI virtualization. I know ListBox has UI virtualization enabled by default and I can see it while scrolling on vertical listbox, but when I disable horizontal scroll on horizontal listboxes, performance is really bad, and sometimes there's an OutOfMemoryException. I understand why this happens because when I disabled horizontal scroll, those listboxes didn't know which items are on screen anymore, so the loaded all of them into memory.

What I also tried is to leave scroll on every listbox so they have UI virtualization, and then place ScrollViewer above them. Then I tried to listen on Manipulation events on scrollviewer and progamatically scroll all of the listboxes as needed. This didn't work good, first of all ManipulationDelta event doesn't appear to fire frequently enough to make scrolling smooth, and I think there could be a performance problem with calling ScrollToHorizontalOffset on ~180 listboxes.

I also tried the LongListSelector from WP8 as I read that it has much better UI virtualization and should be used instead of ListBox. The problem with this is that I couldn't make it scroll horizontally. Is it possible at all? I tried to wrap it into ScrollViewer which can scroll horizontally and it's working, but only if I set fixed width on LLS.

I also tried Telerik's RadDataBoundListBox and the problem was similar, I can't get both horizontal and vertical scrolls on the same listbox. So I could only get that each list scrolls on its own.

Can someone tell me if they had similar situation and what would be the best approach to solve this? I believe I'm not the only one that has this requirement to implement large scrollable table.

Thanks

UPDATE: I'll just inform you that I didn't find a proper way to implement this, instead I've done it in HTML with WebBrowser control. Seems like IE already has UI virtualization implemented so it can work with large pages very well.

Answer 1

May be in your listbox there are images? and Out of memory Execption will occur you can do 2 things:

1. Don't load data in one time use BackgroundWorker
2. Have one local image in the App of the image you are downloading and set it as default image & when you scroll to some 50 values in forward clean the image Url to local and when it comes back give again the image url you want to show .
   Because i have used it to scroll around 20k values.