Opening an XPage file containing a large number of xp elements, CustomControls, and CSS styling rules causes Designer to take significantly longer to render all visuals in the 'Design' tab and thus becomes unresponsive until all rendering is complete.
I have an XPage that contains 40+ CustomControl tags (mostly repeats of singular ones) with a CSS file that's 6.5K lines long.
Rendering all of this upon opening the XPage causes abysmal loading times -- anywhere from 1.5 to 3.5 minutes on average -- until everything in the Design tab is fully rendered with every detail.
In my opinion, this prolonged waiting period just to open an XPage file is unreasonable -- especially to those who rarely (if ever) utilize the 'drag-and-drop' functionality of the 'Design' tab, and instead opt for editing the 'Source' tab directly.
Thankfully my team found a remedy:
Under File -> Preferences -> Domino Designer -> XPages, there is a checkbox to 'Prevent loading of Style Sheet (CSS) resources for the Design tab' that is unchecked by default.
Once this option was checked, opening the same XPage now takes 8 to 15 seconds at most -- loading roughly 90% faster than previous loading times on average.
My main idea here would be to implement one (or both) of these points:
Enable the 'Prevent loading of Style Sheet (CSS) resources for the Design tab' checkbox by default
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The 'Design' tab should apply a more generalized (and less resource-intensive) visual representation of the XPage -- reducing the emphasis of showing minor CSS details.
I believe that if the above suggestions are implemented, these load times (and user frustration) will significantly decrease.
