Need help with GUI

[Durango2008]

Hi, I am not sure if this is the place to seek help for my issue, but I will
explain what I am stuck on.
I am currently creating a page that will display data from a DB using a
Gridview.(simple enough)

The problem I have is that the amount of data to display is alot.
The Gridview consists of 10 columns which represent the 10 fields in the DB
table I pull the data from.
Each piece of data is displayed in a cell, however each piece of data can
have more than 500 characters in it.
This makes for rather large cells that enlarge the Gridview and the page
itself.

What I did to remedy this, is to display only a few characters of data and
truncate the rest in each cell.
The user of this tool was not too impressed with this setup explaining that
the truncated data in each cell are meaningless to him.
The problem is I cannot display the entire data for each cell due to shear
size of data.
I am stuck in between a rock and a hard place with this.
I am wondering if there is an alternative solution to my problem?
Is there some other control that will provide a better means of displaying
this data?

If you need more info pls let me know.

Thank you for any advice.

regards,
Durango

 

[Jonathan Wood]

Your options are limited. Either your going to display the data or you are
not, and if you do, each character will take up some space.

One possibility is to truncate the data as you have, and then display the
full date in a tooltip when the mouse hovers over it. However, I'd be less
than thrilled with that approach.

Yet another possibility is to abandon GridView, and create tables that use
multiple rows to display a single record (along the lines of what
demonstrated at
http://fileparade.com/showpads.php?cat=Web Development::ASP & PHP).

Finally, you could also consider displaying a summary in your grid, with a
link to a details page.