BusinessObjects Board

LONG Dropdown list

other Xcelsius - Crystal Dashboard Design
#1

Hey guys, looking for some tricks here. I’m sure this is a problem that’s been solved before, but Google’s failing me.

I have a dashboard that shows “best price” data for goods purchased. The primary driver for the dashboard is a dropdown that lists the manufacturers/vendors. You select a manufacturer, and it returns dropdowns of part numbers and units. You select those, and the chart fills in.

The problem is that there are just shy of 10,000 manufacturers. The previous developer just upped his limit on rows in Xcelsius and plopped it in. Now it’s throwing fits. The exact fits aren’t important, it’s just obvious that a 10,000 row combo box is a bad idea.

Now, they aren’t easily divided up by region, or type, or anything like that. So, the obvious split is alphabetical. Which is going to be tedious to set up, and anything like toggle buttons for each letter is going to eat up a lot of canvas.

Is there a cool way to pull them 100 at a time, with a “Click for the next 100” option at the bottom of the list? Or some other control that will handle it better than scrolling through the whole list?

Right now I’m leaning towards forcing a search box. I don’t think the client is going to like it, though.

Lugh (BOB member since 2009-07-16)

#2

Hi Lugh

I was thinking of doing something similar for a client.

Using an initial combo box which split the alphabet up into A - C, D - F, G - I, etc… this would then pass the “a;b;c” or “d;e;f” whatever, string to a universe object (something like left(Dimension.ManufacturersName,1)) in my direct binding query to return only those manufacturers starting with that letter.

Sounds like you’ll still get a large list but no where near 10,000, that’s just crazy combobox dataset tomfoolery!

Didn’t need to do this in the end as I managed to group then data in a different way.

cdavies :uk: (BOB member since 2005-01-28)