How to display multiple pages under tabs similar to a Browser tab retaining loaded pages

Question

We have an application where we have a single level navigation menu with some heavy-duty pages on each link. The user can switch back and forth between these pages frequently to obtain information that he needs.

Once the page gets generated, it wouldn't change for the session. However, the page is specific to the user, hence we cant cache it.

I was trying to come up with a solution where we generate the page once, and keep it hidden in the background until its link is clicked, but haven't been able to get my head around this.

One of the ways I thought was to have multiple div tags (one for each page) on one page and keep toggling the visibility as the links are pressed, but that would end up making this single page very heavy. Someone also suggested using iFrames , but I am not really comfortable using the iFrames much and I'm not even sure, if it would be any helpful either.

Can you guys please suggest a few approaches to tackle the issue?

update: Just to clarify, we are fine with keeping the pages separate and navigate across using a standard menu bar. We were just looking for ways to optimize the performance as we know that the pages once generated wouldn't change and there should be some way to tap that benefit.

Answer 1

You can use Ajax tab control for this purpose

Answer 2

Try taking a look at this MSDN article which specifically tackles the issue of how to user-level cache. Also, it might be more manageable to break each tab into a user control. That way your ASP.NET page has just the tab control and 1 user control for each section under the tab. It makes managing tabs much easier.

EDIT:

What I would do in your case, since you say the data won't change for the user, is I would grab the static data from the database and then I would store that data in the Session cache. THe session cache is specific per user and you can try to retrieve the static data from there instead of repetitively calling the database.

Answer 3

Check out the ASP Multiview control. Just remember that even though the different views are hidden when not active, their viewstate is still being sent back and forth. Can be a benefit if you need to check control values across views though.