Big (Infinite) List and Table Data Management

We've had a number of customers who have asked us about how to manage large data samples that they want to display in Storyboard tables. The first approach is always to attempt to map the data in directly to Storyboard table cells and then just resizing the table to match the desired size. This approach can work well for small large numbers, but isn't really practical when you want to load in either an infinite number of elements or potentially thousands or tens of thousands of events as the engine is going to use your table size as a hint and try and allocate some backing store memory for those cells ... even if they will not be drawn onscreen immediately.

Instead of doing this direct table mapping, we suggest a layered approach where you have a data accessor function that uses the table as a window onto a large data set and then just manipulates the Storyboard data variables behind the scenes to provide a 'window on a window on the data'. We don't provide this within the generic table because there may simply be too many different ways that you want to customize it, but rather we're happy to share a sample implementation that you can customize to your own wants and needs.

Check out the InfiniteList sample packaged with your installation of Storyboard to see an example of this solution.