DropDownList Control Functionality

28 Mar 2006 3:39 PM

Matt

Hi. I'm using VS2005 and working with the Dropdownlist control on an ASP page.

My dropdownlist has several thousand items, all integers, ranging from 1000
to 80000 (these represent different company acocunts). With that many items,
I would like the user to be able to not only choose from the list, but type
the number in the list as well to avoid having to scroll through all of them.
Now, if the user currently enters a '1', they are taken to the first record
in the 1000 range - great! But, if the user types '12', they are taken to
the 2000 range (the last number entered), even though there are a list of
codes availabe in the 1200 range. Ideally they should be able to type a
portion or the entire number as well as select it from the dropdown. (I know
this works in non-asp app dev). So, question is: Does anyone know how to
make this functionally work with the standard ASP.NET ddl control, or does
anyone know of another control I can purchase to get this functionality?

Thanks!

-Matt

28 Mar 2006 4:02 PM

Bob Barrows [MVP]

Matt wrote:

> Hi. I'm using VS2005 and working with the Dropdownlist control on an
> ASP page.

Classic ASP (.asp) or ASP.Net ).aspx)?

If the latter (which the use of "dropdownlist" seems to confirm), here is my
standard reply:
There was no way for you to know it, but this is a classic asp newsgroup.
While you may be lucky enough to find a dotnet-savvy person here who can
answer your question, you can eliminate the luck factor by posting your
question to a newsgroup where the dotnet-savvy people hang out. I suggest
microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet.

However, read on ...

>
> My dropdownlist has several thousand items, all integers, ranging
> from 1000
> to 80000 (these represent different company acocunts). With that
> many items, I would like the user to be able to not only choose from
> the list, but type the number in the list as well to avoid having to
> scroll through all of them. Now, if the user currently enters a '1',
> they are taken to the first record
> in the 1000 range - great! But, if the user types '12', they are
> taken to
> the 2000 range (the last number entered), even though there are a
> list of codes availabe in the 1200 range.

This is the standard behavior of an HTML SELECT element, which is what the
asp.net DropDownList control generates.

> Ideally they should be
> able to type a portion or the entire number as well as select it from
> the dropdown. (I know this works in non-asp app dev). So, question
> is: Does anyone know how to make this functionally work with the
> standard ASP.NET ddl control, or does anyone know of another control
> I can purchase to get this functionality?
>

Either create your own user control that combines a textbox, a listbox, and
client-side code to respond to keypress events in the textbox to repopulate
the listbox with the corresponding items.
or
Check out the control library at www.asp.net to make sure you are not
reinventing the wheel

--
Microsoft MVP -- ASP/ASP.NET
Please reply to the newsgroup. The email account listed in my From
header is my spam trap, so I don't check it very often. You will get a
quicker response by posting to the newsgroup.