limitations of dropdown select boxes

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waskelton4
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limitations of dropdown select boxes

Post by waskelton4 »

hope this is the appropriate forum...

here goes..

i'm working on a form that currently has a select box populated from a database for choosing one of the fields..

question is.. it looks like there are gonna be a large number of options in the select box.. possible a few hundred.. is there a better way to do this? i'm not sure that many of the users of the systems know that they can move through the select box using the letters on their keyboard..

is there any better way to do this that i am overlooking? maybe some sort of auto complete javascript with a text box that will inform them if they've entered in an invalid choice?

any ideas? i'm kinda stuck.

i've got a few instances like this that i would like to rememdy..

thanks for any help!

Will
microthick
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Post by microthick »

You could probably write your own sort of autocomplete form, but no current control exists that I know of that works like that.

If you were to create your own, it'd probably be a normal INPUT TEXT box above a SELECT drop-down list. As characters are added to the INPUT TEXT box, you'd have a javascript function execute every keystroke and find the closest SELECT drop-down option that matches.
Unipus
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Post by Unipus »

Well, if you're doing something like a country drop-down, you're sort of stuck, because there's no worthwhile way to break that down. But if you're dealing with another less definitive form of data, I'd say it sounds like time to re-evaluate how you're handling things.

Care to provide a better summary of what you're trying to do?
m3rajk
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Post by m3rajk »

i agree with uni, in the event of something like "choose your country" you're stuck. on the other hand, you might be able to break it down so that there's main catagories that they select, use javascript to actively create a new select box based on that (the default would have one option that's disabled that reads "select parent catagory") and you can break it down as far as possible ot until it's manageable.
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JayBird
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Post by JayBird »

choose your country could be broken down i.e.

Europe
Asia
North America
Latin America
Oceania
Africa & Middle East

Mark
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