Combobox limitations?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

Hi,

I am currently designing a form for inputting an event. In the event they
can mutiple particpants. So I am designing a sub-form for this.

The problem I am having is that the participant list is in the 20-30K range
of returning records.

The combobox loads up really slowly because of this.

What is the limitation on the combobox as to the number of entries?

Is there something else I should be using to do this? Like a third party
Active X control?

Or is there another way I could do this?

Many thanks,

Angela
 
Limit of combo box is 65536 items in the dropdown list.

Yes, long lists can take a long time to fill the combo box.

Alternatives are many -- all involve doing some type of filtering on the
combo box's list prior to displaying it. We can provide suggestions for
doing this if you give us more information about what you're doing on the
form.

If you just want to not wait when you first click on the combo box, you can
use the form's Open event to force the combo box to fill its list:

Private Sub Form_Open(Cancel As Integer)
Dim lngCount As Long
lngCount = Me.ComboBoxName.ListCount
End Sub
 
Hi Ken,

My form has the following on the same screen:
1) Main form where the event information is entered in
a) you know name, location, description, date and time, contact info
fields...
2) Sub form to the main form: where the participant list is developed
a) this has only 1 input field in it and that is the combobox list
that is already
25kish of records in size. This will increase as time goes on.
b) this is a continous forms
c) And is linked back to the Main Form EventID
d) has a button beside the combobox to delete that entry.

Is there any other information you need?

One thing I thought of is to load up the data of participant list into VBA
memory somehow and then when the person types in characters it autofills.
That way it wouldn't load the entire list. But I am unsure how I could do
this. There is one side affect though to this. If more participants are
added to the overall list then that combo box will not reflect thouse
people/businesses.

I also thought just open up a recordset continously for this and do an
autofill from that. Or do an autofill and keep requery for each character.

At most there will be 10 users using this applicaiton initially...

Many thanks for brainstorming with me...

Angela
 
Allen Browne (ACCESS MVP) has one way of doing this:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~allenbrowne/ser-32.html

I know that another ACCESS MVP has another way of doing this, but for the
life of me I cannot find the URL for that example.

I have implemented my own method that uses overlaying text box and combo
box, with code to move back and forth from one to the other and filter the
combo box based on initial entry in the textbox. I have used this with
success in the header of a form, and use the combo box's selection to filter
the form's recordset. I haven't tried it as a setup in a continuous forms
view, though; however, it should work (so long as you wouldn't mind the
switching from textbox to combobox and back occurring visually on all
records besides the one you're working on).

However, I have not put it into a sample database that shows how it works.
But if you're interested, send an email to me (to get my email address,
remove the words this is not real from my reply address) and I'll provide
you with a form that has the controls and underlying code in it. You could
modify the row source query and such, I'm sure, for your needs.

--

Ken Snell
<MS ACCESS MVP>
 
Hi Ken,

Thanks so much for your reply and helping me to brainstorm this issue

I was greatly appreciated....

I wound up using a auto fill query method... Along with assigning the
control a recordset .

this seems reasonable at this time.

Many Thanks!

Angela
 
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