I have a large set of data from which the user has to select one. I\'m thinking of a way to implement it (of course, in a GUI). I have a few ideas. But just thought of posti
Autocomplete is what you are probably looking for. Google for "java swing jcombobox autocomplete" and limit results for the last couple of years to get relevant results. There will be a lot of examples and ideas on how to implement this with custom code.
I believe there is also some custom libraries like "swingx" that provide at least partial or full implementations to save time.
http://swingx.java.net/
They have released code as recently as the beginning of this years so it appears active and might have what you need.