Good questions, I'll try to explain.
I'm working in a developing country, and
the network infrastructure here is very, very poor. The Prime Minister
likes to get on the internet after 11pm because it's faster then, if that helps
you understand the internet is SLOW here. ; Most of the intranets are also
horribly slow also because the networks are infested with viruses. I
don't mean they are virused, I mean they are INFESTED with viruses. One
USB stick we tested had sixteen different viruses on it, each making a
peer-to-peer connection to the internet. We'll be trying to help the
intranets get cleaned up when the software deploys, but I expect many of them
will just get infested again unless we can change the IT security culture.
With that background, you can see I need
to minimize network traffic. J
Instead of thinking "paging" as
in printed pages, think "chunking" as in dividing the document into
chunks. I'm not trying to page the html so they can load a page and print
it one at a time. That would be horrible!
I'm trying to chunk the pages so they are
in smaller pieces. Quite often, in a financial environment, you're only
interested in the detail on the report (which might be 100 pages long) if the
totals (on the last page) aren't right. So, if you had a way to see the
last page of the report without having to download all 100 pages, that would be
an improvement.
You might well ask, why not design the
reports better. Because I inherited hundreds of reports and I have
neither the time nor the trained manpower to do so. The formatting of the
reports has to stay as it is. There are political reasons also, and I
don't have the management time bandwidth to spend time in that arena either.
So, I’m looking for a cheap, generically coded patch to make one aspect
of the system's performance work better.
The existing code base already has code
that prepares the documents in pdf or excel or word format, and I'm porting
that over. This is just to minimize how much of a "to be
viewed" report has to be transmitted over the network.
Hope that helps explain things.