ListView vs ScrolBox?

[Everynone]

Imagine you have 200 widgets.

If you place widgets in a Scroll Box, all of them get instantiated, their assets loaded and it all sits in the memory. If you use a List View, only the necessary widgets will be created - on the fly. The List View will automagically maintain their lifecycle.

There’s a tangible example at the end of this post:

Creating a combat log in Blueprint

No problem, if you want to experiment with the List View instead: create an Object class blueprint in the content browser with an exposed text variable - it will be used to store data in the list view, called Entry Data below. once you have it, you can do this in the wLogLine’s class settings: [linewithlistviewinterface.jpg] The Implemented Interfaces bit on the left is the critical part here! It allows you to pull the data from a list view object and assign it to the widget’s variable. Th…

A combat log like this could easily grow to hold thousands of widget entries, but the likelihood of the user wanting to seem them all is pretty low. So it’s better to have a List View hold just the data, rather than have a Scroll Box keep it all alive at all times.

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This tooltip:

is not really that accurate in my experience, more than 5 would be created and kept alive. I’d say around 10, but that’s much better than 200!

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If you need to display just a handful of widgets, a Scroll Box will be more than fine. If you need to handle hundreds or thousands elements, consider paying the upfront cost of setting up a List View.