Dörffler & Partner Sees Up
to 10x Grid Performance
Improvement withInfragistics Data Grid
Dörffler & Partner is an IT consultancy based inGermany, which specializes in developing andimplementing custom business intelligence (BI)and data warehouse solutions. With a client basethat spans financial services, banking, insurance,automotive and energy & utilities, the solutions theybuild must be enterprise-grade to handle the data
volumes and workloads of their customers.

Industry• IT Consultancy based in Germany
Challenges• Need to provide data visualizations and gridsthat can support large data sets and highvolumes of queries in real time

• Experiencing performance issues with theexisting data grid

• Difficulty binding data from the data warehouseto the data grids• Issues with technical support from existingvendor causing weeks of delay

if a company only needs a“ Evendata grid control, I’d recommend

Infragistics because the control isalready worth the price of thewhole package.

“Danny Smith, Senior BI Consultant, Dörffler & Partner

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Solution• Infragistics Professional UI Tools
Results• Up to 10x data grid performance improvement• Fast data entry and ability to query data inparallel as it loads• Fastest technical support response time

Challenge

When Dörffler & Partner builds custom BI and data warehouse applications for its clients, the data grid
embedded within each application is a critical component. Because their clients in financial services,insurance, automotive and energy & utilities process thousands of queries per minute, grid performanceis a top requirement. A slow-performing grid means wait times while screens refresh with new data — anunacceptable situation for a financial services company, for example, with a need to respond to the hundreds
or thousands of market updates that are streaming live, every millisecond.

For Dörffler’s developers, the ability to easily bind data in the data warehouse to the grid is also important.

The longer it takes to bind data or to load data into the grid, the more time a developer spends waiting and not
being productive.

But the data grid that developers at Dörffler & Partner were using fell far short.
“I had tried the grid from Microsoft and the grid from another licensed component vendor, and we always

had problems either with performance or the handling of the grid,” says Danny Smith, Senior BI Consultant atDörffler. “We often had problems every time a new release came out.”

The issue with the vendor’s data grid was stability. “We found its data grid to be unstable,” says Cornelius

Bode, Senior BI Consultant at Dörffler & Partner. “Each time they brought out a new release, we’d update thenew code, recompile it, and it wouldn’t work. We had to go back and forth with the vendor, and oftentimes it
took us weeks to finally resolve, delaying the app release.”

Enterprise-Grade Data Grid with Superior Performance
In response, Dörffler purchased Infragistics Professional with the Ultimate UI for Windows Forms toolkit.

Ultimate UI for Windows Forms offers a complete set of Windows Forms UI controls, including data grids,

high-performance charts, Microsoft® Office-style user interface tools, dashboards, and reports with touchand gesture support.

The team at Dörffler immediately noticed the difference in the performance of the data grid. According toSmith, “when I started using the Infragistics grid, a lot of my problems just went away.”

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Fully Featured Grid
Not only did Dörffler see performance improvements, they were also impressed with many other features of
the Infragistics data grid.

“Once I got used to the Infragistics data grid, I started using more of the advanced features like inline editors,
pulldowns, data validation (especially dates), specific cell formatting in the InitializeRow event — the list goeson and on,” adds Smith. “I especially like the ability to export the data in the grid to Excel, XML and pdf files
with only a few lines of source code.”Dörffler also appreciates how fast it can enter data into the grid. Infragistics UI toolkits come with templateswith custom editors that match the column data type and allow easy entering of data within the cells. The

data grid also features many flexible options for handling data with components that allow for easily adding ordeleting rows, performing data validations in realtime, and more.

Infragistics data grid was 5x to 10x faster than what
“ Thewe had been using. One of our customers is now loading
1,000-plus rows per second with no lag time.
“Cornelius Bode, Senior BI Consultant at Dörffler & Partner

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The DateTime Editor with its pulldown Calendar makes entering dates simpler, and the grid’s validation
function means that false, missing or bad dates are no longer being sent to the database.

With Combobox Editor, Dörffler’s customers can more quickly choose from a list rather than typing text,

avoiding misspellings. And Combobox Editor lists are not limited to one list per column, users can dynamicallychange the list items per row, or accept input from a different cell in the grid.

“In one grid I made, I was showing a list of suppliers in one column and depending on the selected supplier I
would show a list of the names and emails of the contact persons for that supplier,” adds Bode.

Dörffler also likes the ability to view data in parallel, while it’s loading into the grid. “This enables me to query in realtime, making it simpler and faster to use,” adds Smith. “I can also easily move data from one database to another.

“I especially like being able to change all the text inside the grid control, like the names of the operators in thefilter dropdown list. I was able to translate all the text into German. And it’s not just limited to grid control, it canbe done for the other controls also.”

I started using the Infragistics grid a“ Whenlot of my problems just went away..
“Danny Smith, Senior BI Consultant, Dörffler & Partner

infragistics.com

Another feature that the Dörffler team values is the AppStylist program, which enables them to easily recolor
all parts of Infragistics’ Windows Forms controls: from the backgrounds and foregrounds, to the active rows,

selected rows, and enabled/disabled controls. “You can change almost everything in your GUI to correspond to

your customer’s corporate identity,” says Smith. “At one customer site, we used this feature extensively, pouringmuch love and sweat into finding just the right combo of colors to make the end users happy.”

Fastest Support
Support often goes unnoticed until it’s needed. But for developers who are working on deadline, the ability

to get real-time, responsive support from a real person is invaluable, especially when it means the difference
between making a client deadline and having a project stall.

“I can remember cases where I was stuck and just couldn’t figure something out,” says Bode. “With Infragistics,I would contact customer support and I would always have a solution within 1 day, without fail. I’ve worked withother companies where I wouldn’t get a resolution for 3 weeks and I had to literally stop the project. Infragistics’
responses always come fast and they always provide a complete solution to the problem.”Bode also says that he finds the Infragistics support forums to be very active and notes that “you can find a

lot of information just by exploring these forums, which are categorized by system (desktop, web, and others)
and/or control, including grid, chart, and much more.”

all the years that I’ve used the Infragistics controls, I’ve only
“ Insubmitted
5 tickets to support and they weren’t because of bugs.

I asked, “how do I do this …” and promptly got answers that let me
quickly close all my tickets, with all the right answers.
Cornelius Bode, Senior BI Consultant, Dörffler & Partner.

infragistics.com“Grid Stability
Infragistics releases updates to its UI toolkits, components and controls multiple times per year, providing

new features and functionality, based on customer feedback and market needs. But the team of developers
who support them always performs rigorous testing, before each release. User experience is built into eachcomponent, control and release, so that customers know that when they upgrade their toolkit, they can beconfident that it will be a quick and easy process, and that everything will work.
This wasn’t always the case.
“Each time the other licensed grid component vendor brought out a new release, we’d update the new code,

recompile it, and it wouldn’t work,” says Bode. “We had to go back and forth with the vendor. It sometimes took
us weeks. I’ve never had this problem with Infragistics, I upload the new code, update it, recompile and that’s
it – it just works.”

Cross-Framework Features and Controls

Dörffler is now planning a project for a marketing customer where they intend to place Infragistics chart
controls on a website built with ASP.NET.

“This is another plus of using Infragistics Professional,” adds Smith, “you don’t have to buy different products
for desktop, Web or mobile. It’s all in one package.”

About Infragistics

Infragistics provides the world’s largest enterprises with tools and solutions to accelerate application designand development, and foster team collaboration. More than two million developers worldwide use Infragistics’enterprise-ready UX and UI toolkits to rapidly prototype and build high-performing applications for the cloud,web, mobile and desktop. Infragistics’ Reveal reimagines what business users can achieve with self-service
business intelligence visualization, while its newest application, Indigo.Design, introduces design-to-code

efficiencies during the designer-to-developer handoff. Infragistics clients represent 100% of the S&P 500,
including global software providers who rely on Infragistics when reliability and performance are
non-negotiable.

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