On-Demand Loading of Tabbed Related Lists

[#1]

I put in an enhancement request on /hi/ for this, but I figured I might as well post one here too.

It'd be really nice if there was an option to only load related lists on-demand, when the tab functionality is enabled.

That way, some tables/views that have a lot of potential related lists (like core_company) have all the related lists available, but don't consume as much bandwidth, and load much faster. I noticed the load times on forms (with related list tabs enabled) seem to be a bit longer than normal, and this would help with that as well.

[#2]

I have a bit of trouble with AJAX requests here, in that there is quite a bit of lag waiting for the call to return a result. It's just a lag issue, not a bandwidth issue. For tabs, I'd prefer to wait a little extra at the beginning, and have all parts of the form load in, rather than waiting on each click to a related list.

In your case, have you considered setting up multiple form views? Having a stripped down version of the form, with the option to switch over to the heavily-related-lists form may help. I'm not sure of the specific example you're working on here, but the 80/20 rule might come in handy - are most of the related lists being utilised over 80% when viewing that form?

http://wiki.service-now.com/index.php?title=Form_Views

[#3]

Yeah, I have several views for most tables, but a few of the related lists are required universally, and can get kind of big. Plus, most people end up setting the maximum number of visible rows, which doesn't help the load times at all.

One thing I've noticed since the upgrade is that the related lists, tabbed or no, take longer to load than before, and tend to lock the form down while loading.

An alternative would be populating the related lists on form load using an AJAX request, but doing so asynchronously. That would allow the rest of the form to load and be used, and then when the data has been successfully returned the form would just populate the existing related lists.

I figure that way, you'll still have the same loading time, it's just that users will be able to actively use the form much earlier in the process. Of course, it would be best to have this as an optional system properties setting, so that it's not mandatory.

The "load data on tab click" system (if enabled in properties), would work with this as well; you would benefit from faster initial load times, as well as reduced bandwidth consumption from only displaying the explicitly requested lists. Only a few steps from loading each individual related list using AJAX, to loading only requested lists. (Of course, those few steps will probably cause some programmer somewhere to tear their hair out and/or drink.)

[#4]

Sounds like you know what you're after, which is more a core change rather than anything that can be accomplished via scripting. I'd wait for the developers to get back to you on the /HI enhancement request and see what they can do.

[jesmarquez]

Were you able to find a solution for this? I would like to set our instance to default Related lists to "After Form Loads" option in Eureka/Fuji. I found a system property, glide.ui.defer_related_lists, that was set to false. I set it to true but nothing happens.