Dropdown on ASP page

[JP SIngh]

Hi All

I just wondering if someone can suggest a solution to this tricky issue we
have got.

I have an asp form which allow our users to create a new record and save it
to the database. On the form one of the field's is a "clientname" field
which is a dropdown populated from one of the tables called clients.

The issue is the clients table has about 3000 records. I have created a
dropdown to display all the client to allow the users to choose from it but
I would think this will cause issues when it comes to selecting a client
that it will be quite difficult to navigate and scroll a dropdown of 3000+
records to find the client that the user needs. Further I would like to
think it is quite an inefficient use of resources to display 3000 records in
a dropdown when only one is going to be choosen.

Has anyone got any suggestions on how this can be improved? I thought about
creating a pop box to allow users to search for the clients , then
displaying the client names as hyperlinks and the choosen one is them
clicked but this has an issue. If the record was saved at that point I could
simply write update code to change the client field of the record at that
stage but the issue is the record is still being created i.e. I don't have
the ID (autonumber in the access database) hence cannot run an update query
to store the selected client in the database.

Can you think of anything else? Any help is greatly appreciated. Please post
a comment if anything in this post is not clear.

 

[McKirahan]

Hi All

I just wondering if someone can suggest a solution to this tricky issue we
have got.

I have an asp form which allow our users to create a new record and save it
to the database. On the form one of the field's is a "clientname" field
which is a dropdown populated from one of the tables called clients.

The issue is the clients table has about 3000 records. I have created a
dropdown to display all the client to allow the users to choose from it but
I would think this will cause issues when it comes to selecting a client
that it will be quite difficult to navigate and scroll a dropdown of 3000+
records to find the client that the user needs. Further I would like to
think it is quite an inefficient use of resources to display 3000 records in
a dropdown when only one is going to be choosen.

Has anyone got any suggestions on how this can be improved? I thought about
creating a pop box to allow users to search for the clients , then
displaying the client names as hyperlinks and the choosen one is them
clicked but this has an issue. If the record was saved at that point I could
simply write update code to change the client field of the record at that
stage but the issue is the record is still being created i.e. I don't have
the ID (autonumber in the access database) hence cannot run an update query
to store the selected client in the database.

Can you think of anything else? Any help is greatly appreciated. Please post
a comment if anything in this post is not clear.

One approach is to have the user select a letter and generate a drop-down
list of only client names that start with that letter.

An IE-only approach is to generate a single-drop down and add "type ahead"
support so that when each successive character is entered the nearest option
is selected.

// Cooking with JavaScript & DHTML
// Bonus Recipe: Typing select Element Choices in IE for Windows
// http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2003/09/03/dannygoodman.html
// http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/4135

 

[Ganesh]

Hi,
I have done the following to implement the same kind of search for one of my
sites.
1. Provide alphabetical links A till Z.
2. Clicking on one of the alphabets, I will display the records that start
with the chosen alphabet. This reduces the sql overhead. It also reduces the
time the user has to search, if he knows the starting alphabet though .
3. When the user selects a particular record, i will set that value to my
form textbox.

Does this help?
Ganesh