Max Number of Web Controls Per Page

[Guest]

I am in the early stages of an ASP.NET project and my Architect is proposing
a form that would have as many as 1200 (twelve-hundred!) textboxes on a
single page. Aside from the usability concerns, I'm trying to identify other
obstacles to this approach.

One thought I had was that this many web controls may start to seriously tax
..NET vis-a-vis the Viewstate. Essentially that loading this many textboxes
on a form will create tons of overhead as .NET has to maintain values for
each of these controls between postbacks in Viewstate.

I guess I'm looking to find out if there is a hard maximum for the number of
web controls per page/form, OR what rule of thumb I can use to try and gauge
performance expectations under these conditions.

Any information or hints are greatly apprecaited.

Regards,

Chris Frohlich

 

[Andrew Robinson]

The textbox control maintains its own state within the resulting HTML
<input> tag so ViewState will not be an issue. Other controls may or may not
require ViewState. ASP.NET should be able to handle that many controls
without issue but I would question any kind of architecture that required
1200 controls on a single page. Usability etc aside, your biggest issue is
likely to be just moving that much data back and forth between the client
and server with a high level of performance.