Too many drop down lists in my page

Hi Ranchers,

I have too many drop down lists in my page. It is severely hampering my performance.

But one good thing is I think the performance can be increased with the help of some javascript methods. I just want an expert opinion from you folks.

The requirement is pretty simple. I will have 'n' drop down lists and the options in the drop down lists are again the same 'n' values.

Say my <option> tags are "ONE" "TWO" "THREE", "FOUR", i will have four drop down lists with the option values being these one of 4 values. If 4 is the case, things are fine since I will have only 4 x 4 = 16 values. But when the option count is 800 in my case

. I am having 800 x 800 = 640000 options in my page!!!
I dont have the pagination option, clients dont want it. Is there a way to address this issue ?

Please advise.

The following is a sample prototype I am working on ..

Thanks,
Bragaadeesh.

Why are you doing this in JavaScript rather than in a server-side template such as JSP or PHP?

And, your client wants 800+ values in a dropdown? Hardly usable!

But when the option count is 800 in my case

Are you serious? The user has to make 800 choices before getting any result? Preposterous, time to rethink your architecture.

Bill

As is quite apparent, 800 options does make the whole thing quite unusuable. In fact, I think that beyond a reasonable number like 20, the options become quite hard to scroll and find.
If you don't want to do things at the server side, you can probably use an AJAX based lookup solution. Ask the user to type a few characters, and retrieve a small list of values which partially/completely match the typed in value.

Anirvan Majumdar wrote:As is quite apparent, 800 options does make the whole thing quite unusuable.

I entirely agree with this. Well, I like your Ajax idea. Thank you guys for your help.