A more efficient selection ?

swatisonee

Hi,

I'm using the following code by which users pick up a name from a field in a table. It worked well for a fair bit but now my table has about 2500 odd names and its getting tedious scrolling thru the list .

Can anyone suggest a more efficient way to go about it ? maybe a user typing the first 3 letters of a name or some such ??


Customer</td><td><select name="customer"><option value="">[Select One]
      <?php

mysql_connect("localhost", $dbname, $dbpasswd )
    	or die ("Unable to connect to server.");

mysql_select_db($database)
    	or die ("Unable to select database.");

$result = mysql_query("SELECT DISTINCT `Company` FROM `Customers` ORDER BY `Company` asc ");

if ($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {

  do {

printf("<option>
  %s", $myrow["Company"]);

  } while ($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result));

} 
?></select>

Thanks. Swati

obsidian

swatisonee wrote:
Can anyone suggest a more efficient way to go about it ? maybe a user typing the first 3 letters of a name or some such ??

if the user knows what they're after, allowing them to type the first couple letters and using a "google suggest"-esque approach would do nicely. basically, run a little AJAX script that would allow you to query your DB for matching names with every keystroke and let them scroll through only the results.

if they are coming in blind and wanting to look through the list of names, though, you'll be in the same boat with needing to give them a way to browse the entire list.

swatisonee

Thanks obsidian but for this particular case, the user always knows the name or definitely the first part of it.

I'm clueless about ajax scripts - are there some snippets that i could look at to understand ?

Thanks.

maxtech

u can find a better soultion using XAJAX for this................coz i too had the same problem which worked out later

swatisonee

and what might XAJAX be please?