I am working on a Browser-based media player which is written almost entirely in HTML 5 and JavaScript.
The backend is written in PHP but it has one function which is to fill
the playlist on
the initial load. And
the rest is all JS. There is a search bar that refines
the playlist. I want it to refine as
the person is typing, like most media players do.
The only problem with this is that it is very slow and laggy as there are about 1000 songs in
the whole program and there is likely to be more as time goes on.
The original playlist load is an ajax call to a PHP page that returns
the results as JSON. Each item has 4 attirbutes:
artist
album
file
url
I then loop through each object and add it to an array called playlist. At
the end of
the looping a copy of playlist is created, backup. This is so that I can refine
the playlist variable when people refine their search, but still repopulated it from backup without making another server request.
The method refine() is called when
the user types a key into
the searchbox. It flushes playlist and searches through each property (not including url) of each object in
the backup array for a match in
the string. If there is a match in any of
the properties, it appends
the information to a table that displays
the playlist, and adds it to
the object to playlist for access by
the actual player.
Code for
the refine() method:
function refine() {
$('#loadinggif').show();
$('#library').html("<table id='libtable'><tr><th>Artist</th><th>Album</th><th>File</th><th> </th></tr></table>");
playlist = [];
for (var j = 0; j < backup.length; j++) {
var sfile = new String(backup[j].file);
var salbum = new String(backup[j].album);
var sartist = new String(backup[j].artist);
if (sfile.toLowerCase().search($('#search').val().toLowerCase()) !== -1 || salbum.toLowerCase().search($('#search').val().toLowerCase()) !== -1 || sartist.toLowerCase().search($('#search').val().toLowerCase()) !== -1) {
playlist.push(backup[j]);
num = playlist.length-1;
$("<tr></tr>").html("<td>" + num + "</td><td>" + sartist + "</td><td>" + salbum + "</td><td>" + sfile + "</td><td><a href='#' onclick='setplay(" + num +");'>Play</a></td>").appendTo('#libtable');
}
}
$('#loadinggif').hide();
}
As I said before, for
the first couple of letters typed, this is very slow and laggy. I am looking for ways to refine this to make it much faster and more smooth.
