Hi, I have a table of suburbs, about 15,000, which I use in a dropdown value list, works fine AFTER the initial choosing. I thought I read somewhere about pre-loading the value list into the cache would recify this but haven't been able to locate the post.

anyone help .. or other ways for such a huge value list

BTW, the FM file is hosted, it's not so bad on the local copy

regards

cate

The initial choosing is loading up the data into cache.

There is a point at which drop down lists become unusable. I'd suggest it's a couple of hundred options.

Switch to a "picker" that performs finds and displays the results in a list view in a floating window.

Hi Vaughan, thanks for the reply

I've used the picker thingy before to filter drop down of clients via their groups, but on the suburb / town value list I want the whole lot to be available (Australia wide). I'd also seen somewhere where the user started typing and the list would reduce / filter as they typed, not sure how that's done but I presume it would still have to load the whole list into the cache first.

I thought I'd seen a function (presumably a custom function) that would load a value list into the cache and though I could run that during my start up script

... Had another thought, at present I have the value list sorting alphabetically, might try and redo the list so it's already alphabetical and therefore doesn't need sorting - it's not as though the table gets added to. I'd redo the whole list maybe once a year

nope, that didn't do anything, seems FM will do a sort anyway, there's no way to tell it not to

... again it's really only a pain on the hosted file, would that be a lack of resources on their server or just the nature of being a hosted file ?