Alternatives to huge drop down lists (24,000+ items)

Question

In my admin section, when I edit items, I have to attach each item to a parent item. I have a list of over 24,000 parent items, which are listed alphabetically in a drop down list (a list of music artists).

The edit page that lists all these items in a drop down menu is 2MB, and it lags like crazy for people with old machines, especially in Internet Explorer.

Whats a good alternative to replicate the same function, where I would need to select 1 of these 24,000 artists, without actually having them all pre-loaded into a drop down menu.

Answer 1

Instead of filling a drop list with so many names you could:

1. Create a simple search mechanism where you match the start of a name
2. Make use of categories (if any are available) and multiple combo boxes to narrow selection
3. Same as above, some sort of tree structure with a categorical hierarchy
4. A shortcuts control where there is a link or a button for letter of the alphabet (meta-category)

Of course a lot of this depends on the stack you're implementing e.g. are you using AJAX or jQuery, access to a db/type.

Answer 2

Assuming the person knows what they're looking for you could create a simple auto suggest feature. Checkout http://code.drewwilson.com/entry/autosuggest-jquery-plugin.

Answer 3

Use jquery (or the like) which have numerous auto-complete dropdowns available. For example:

http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Autocomplete

Answer 4

Assuming the users have some idea of what/who they are looking for (in this case, an artist), I think an auto-complete textbox would be best. This approach would eliminate your initial load issues provide for a clean AJAX-y implementation which users tend to favor these days. Alternatively, since you are dealing with artist names, you might want to include an "alphabet" control which allows the user to reduce the list of artists by first initial (first and/or last). I've seen this done pretty effectively with a hyperlink for each letter. The same approach could be implemented with a dropdown which includes all letters in the alphabet dynamically loads a filtered artist dropdown based on the selection.