ASP.NET 2.0 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

19.1. Reducing Page Size by Selectively Disabling the ViewState

Problem

You want to reduce the size of your application pages to improve performance.

Solution

Review each page of your application and each of its controls to determine if the ViewState is required. Disable the ViewState where it is not explicitly needed.

In the code for the page, use the .NET language of your choice to do either of the following:

• Disable the ViewState for the page by setting the EnableViewState attribute in the @ Page directive to False. (Alternatively, set Page.EnableViewState to False in the code-behind.)

• Disable the ViewState for individual controls on the page by setting the control’s EnableViewState attribute to False. (Alternatively, set the control’s EnableViewState property to False in the code-behind.)

To illustrate these performance improvements, we took two examples from Chapter 2 and optimized them by disabling the ViewState. In the first example, we took the ASP. NET page created for Recipe 2.22, which displays a grid containing books and price data, and disabled the ViewState at the page level. Table 19-1 shows the page and ViewState size before and after the optimization.

Table 19-1. ViewState performance improvement for Recipe 2.22 example

Â	Before optimization	After optimization
Page size	9,947 bytes	6,766 bytes
ViewState size	3,362 bytes	162 bytes

In the second example, we have used the ASP.NET page created in Recipe 2.10 and disabled the ViewState for the row controls within ...