I have an ambitious requirement for an asp.net 2.0 web page that contains a table (gridview), and each row in the grid contains 6 select (dropdown) controls for data entry. The number of rows that will be displayed is dependent upon the user's search parameters, which are specified in another area of the page. Unfortunately, with the default (and even basic) search parameters specified, the grid could contain several hundred rows. I've noticed that the browser, in this case IE8, starts behaving rather erratically once I reach a large number of rows -- no documented evidence for the number of rows where this begins to be a problem. For example, trying to view the source of the page results in a message from IE stating that there was a problem with the page that forced the browser to reload it, and I never get the source. Obviously the page loads and renders rather slowly also.

I know that my solution is probably going to involve paging the gridview such that it only displays 20 or so rows per page, and I'll have to write code to handle the saving of changes in the dropdown values when the user changes pages. I can probably turn off viewstate on the gridview also. However, the question I really want to pose is this -- has anyone seen a documented rule indicating the maximum number of input controls that an HTML browser form is supposed to be able to contain? I could not find anything on the Internet after doing a search, and I suspect the answer may be whatever the browser can handle based on the machine configuration it is running on. Any rules of thumb you use?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Rich