Partial Page Rendering Using Hidden Iframe

Partial-page rendering removes the need for the whole web page to be refreshed as the result of a postback. Instead, only individual regions of the page that have changed are updated. As a result, users do not see the whole page reload with every postback, which makes user interaction with the Web page more seamless.

Developers that want to add such behaviors to their web pages are often faced with a difficult decision. All of these actions can be implemented using a very simple solution: by refreshing the entire page in response to the user interaction. However this solution is easy but not always desirable. The full page refresh can be slow, giving the user the impression that the application is unresponsive. Another option is to implement such actions using JavaScript (or other client-side scripting technologies). This results in faster response times, at the expense of more complex, less portable code. JavaScript may be a good choice for simple actions, such as updating an image. However, for more complicated actions, such as scrolling through data in a table, writing custom JavaScript code can be a very challenging undertaking.

This paper provides a solution...