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.
