XPO - 11.2 Sneak Peek – XPCollection performance improvements (once again!)

As you probably know, when inserting or removing records from collections supporting IBindingList, it is necessary to load the entire collection (that means constructing its persistent objects and their related objects graphs) from the database. It is an understandable requirement (we need to fire the IBindingList.ListChanged event with correct indices), but it might drive to some XPO customers crazy. For example, if we inserted or removed an object from an associated details collection containing a lot of complex objects, it might become a performance problem.

Though there has been an unofficial solution (based on the use of IList collections instead of collections of XPCollection type) available for many years, it was not final and had some drawbacks (the need to redesign persistent classes, inability to access Criteria and other features of the XPCollection, data binding limitations, etc.). Finally, improving the current state of affairs has also been one of the most popular requests our customers asked  us for in recent years.

Our developers have managed to work around the limitation described above in version 11.2, and trust me, it is something you will notice immediately. Generally, XPCollection will perform significantly faster on inserting and deleting objects into and from a large associated 1-M details collection. Certainly, the exact speed improvement will depend on the collection size, the complexity of your objects graphs and other factors. Note that these changes do not affect M-M details collections at this time, because this is a more difficult case. We will research it the future.

To test it in action, I used a modified version of the test application (you can download it here) from my previous blog. See my results below:

As you see, it is ~100x faster on insert and ~10x faster on removal when the details collection was comprised of 10000 objects. These improvements will be more noticeable, the greater the size of the details collection.

Do you like the XPO improvements? Please let us know your opinion!

Happy XPOing!