Improving Data Viewer’s page load time

Getting data and formatting it takes processing time on the server and also the client PC. It’s easy to add all columns to the Data-Viewer display when configuring it. Not only will this typically add a horizontal scroll bar to the display, it also adds to page load time.

It’s best to include just the columns that end users absolutely need to see. You can always also:

• include the Title column with a link to the item or the Action Menu so users can open the form to see everything for a particular item
• include the interactive option to allow end users to add more columns to the display as they need

The Data-Viewer load time process that takes the longest is formatting the data. Not all data types require formatting; for example, Single Line Text columns do not require formatting.

If you can minimize the data that requires formatting, your page will load faster. Columns that require formatting and take the longest to process are:

• Date Time
• People and Group

If you need to display a Date Time column and want to improve performance, you could add a calculated column to your list and display it instead of the Date Time column. The formula below is an example that stores a date value in a text column:

  =TEXT([Due Date],"mm/dd/yyyy")

If this calculated column is stored as TEXT, it requires no formatting when displayed. Including it in the Data-Viewer display rather than the Date Time column will improve performance.

NOTE: Date values stored as text are sorted as TEXT, so create your formula appropriately if you plan to enable interactive sorting for your end users.