We were recently asked by the team at eQuorum to investigate an issue with dgrid performance when leveraging the dgrid/Tree mixin. The issue was challenging to solve, so we thought it would be useful to share our story in debugging and solving it.

It’s been over a year since the release of dgrid 0.4, which brought about some major changes, including integration with the new dstore API. Since then, we (and others) have used it in numerous applications, and we’ve continued to refine it.

Nearly every sufficiently large web application looks for a mechanism to efficiently synchronize or bind data between the Model and the View. There are many large scale application frameworks and approaches focused on this, whether the binding is one-directional like React, or follows other approaches such as those seen with AmpersandJS, Angular, Aurelia, Backbone, Ember, Knockout, Mayhem, or many others listed on ToDoMVC.

Throughout the course of June, the dgrid StackOverflow tag saw a series of questions regarding usage of dgrid and dstore with the Django REST Framework. Based on the flurry of closely-related questions that popped up, I became quite curious as to the actual level of difficulty involved with this integration.

We have released dstore version 1.1, which features a new set of stores for local DB storage. This feature provides the ability to store data locally in browsers, and use high-performance querying capabilities through the disparate technologies of IndexedDB and WebSQL (and localStorage), through the consistent dstore interface.

While a more recent advancement allows us use the HTML5 file API to retrieve contents from files, this approach is not universally supported in web browsers as yet. Instead, we will access data from user-uploaded CSV files using the following steps: Upload a file to the server Retrieve the file from the server Load the data into an easy-to-use format Traditional file uploads from within a form are only permitted when the entire form is submitted to the server and a new page is returned.