display more than 50000 records in visualforce page

Question

I know we cannot display more than 50000 records(or probably even much higher) in a Visualforce Page without avoiding viewstate. From an external webservice I am getting more than 50000 records and my senior manager tells me to display these records on the page.

My answer to this is its not possible but he wont listen.

Answer 1

You can either use client-side or server-side pagination. Either way, you won't be able to use standard tools like StandardSetController or OFFSET.

Server-side, you need to use the @ReadOnly annotation to enable the 1,000,000 row limit, which might look like this:

@RemoteAction @ReadOnly public static SObject[] getRecords(Integer page) {
SObject[] results = new SObject[0];
for(SObject[] records: [SELECT ... FROM SObject WHERE ... LIMIT :page*200]) {
    results = records;
}
return results;
}

From there, you just repeatedly call the value until you get all of your results:

var buffer = []
function getPage(i) {
myController.getPage(i, function(event, data) {
     if(data.length) {
         data.forEach(function(v) {buffer.push(v)})
         getPage(i+1)
     }
}
}

Client-side, it'd look more like this example from the docs:

var result = sforce.connection.query("select id, name from account"); 
var it = new sforce.QueryResultIterator(result); 
var buffer = [];
while (it.hasNext()) { 
var account = it.next(); 
buffer.push(account);
} 

Answer 2

I believe you just want them to be shown on VF page.

So you can use javascript remoting. JS remoting will call your websrrvice. You will get the JSON response.

On your VF page, parse the JSON response and display these in form of tables using Javascript.

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.pages.meta/pages/pages_js_remoting.htm

JS remoting doesnt consume ViewState. And once you get data in json onto browser you can create own tables and display in format you want.

Also if it is for Viewing purpose, its advised to not insert those records onto your database.

Note: You cannot insert more than 10000 records in a transaction.