I want to display >50000 rows in a table. Which is the best control to use: a DataGrid or a ListView (in details view)? Which of these controls will have the better performance?
As Hans says in a comment to the original question, they're both going to have abysmal performance, surpassed only by the displeasure that your users will surely experience at the insanity of so many lines of data being displayed at the same time.
But if this is unavoidable in your application (and you provide a very good search function), then you should strongly consider using the virtual mode option, regardless of which control you decide to use. This means that you must provide your own data-management operations, rather than relying on the control to do it for you. The advantage is that things are much faster. As the documentation says:
Virtual mode is designed for use with very large stores of data. When the
VirtualMode
property is true, you create aDataGridView
with a set number of rows and columns and then handle theCellValueNeeded
event to populate the cells. Virtual mode requires implementation of an underlying data cache to handle the population, editing, and deletion of DataGridView cells based on actions of the user. For more information about implementing virtual mode, see How to: Implement Virtual Mode in the Windows Forms DataGridView Control.
Or, for the ListView
control:
Setting the
VirtualMode
property to true puts theListView
into virtual mode. In Virtual mode, the normalItems
collection is unused. Instead,ListViewItem
objects are created dynamically as the ListView requires them.Virtual mode can be useful under many circumstances. If a
ListView
object must be populated from a very large collection already in memory, creating aListViewItem
object for each entry can be wasteful. In virtual mode, only the items required are created. In other cases, the values of theListViewItem
objects may need to be recalculated frequently, and doing this for the whole collection would produce unacceptable performance. In virtual mode, only the required items are calculated.In order to use virtual mode, you must handle the
RetrieveVirtualItem
event, which is raised every time theListView
requires an item. This event handler should create theListViewItem
object that belongs at the specified index. In addition, theVirtualListSize
property must be set to the size of the virtual list.Handling the
SearchForVirtualItem
event enables searching in virtual mode. If this event is not handled, theFindItemWithText
andFindNearestItem
methods will return null.You can handle the
CacheVirtualItems
event in order to maintain a cache ofListViewItem
objects. If the calculation or lookup to create aListViewItem
object is expensive, maintaining a cache can improve performance.If the
View
property is set to Tile, the value will automatically be changed to LargeIcon whenVirtualMode
is set to true.In virtual mode, the
Items
collection is disabled. Attempting to access it results in anInvalidOperationException
. The same is true of theCheckedItems
collection and theSelectedItems
collection. If you want to retrieve the selected or checked items, use theSelectedIndices
andCheckedIndices
collections instead.