Throughout my career, I have encountered a recurring issue that has yet to be resolved with an elegant solution. Picture this: You have a basic page with a repeater that is populated on the server side through data binding. Everything works smoothly and efficiently as intended. Then you decide to introduce pagination or make other adjustments to the output using Ajax for enhanced client interaction.
You create a web service to deliver JSON data, but now you face a dilemma. Either you must write intricate client-side code to modify specific fields in each repeater item, completely rebuild the server-side output from scratch, or opt for my recent method of duplicating the first repeated item and updating its fields while discarding the rest.
All existing approaches fall short due to redundant logic required both server side (template in repeater) and client side (JavaScript for displaying JSON data). There has to be a simpler, more effective way to tackle this challenge. One immediate thought is to return pre-populated repeater HTML instead of JSON from the web server, though this may not reduce output size significantly compared to using ASP.NET AJAX Update panel.
My next consideration was JavaScript templates. Is there a feasible method to transform an unprocessed repeater template on the server side into a JavaScript template embedded on the page during loading or included in the web service response? Unfortunately, no existing solutions seem readily available for this task, and I am unable to devise a straightforward approach myself. Any suggestions?
P.S. Disregarding the option of rendering JavaScript templates at page load and populating them using JavaScript without initial server-based rendering (without repeater and data binding) due to performance concerns.