Popup List Selection Problems

[jwalz]

I am trying to write an app where a user could select items from a master list to build a sub-list. At the moment I am trying to popup a list of 50,000+ items in a separate window for speed and minimal clutter purposes, so that a user could select one item and that information would be passed back to the calling page and added to their overall selection list. At the moment my popup window consists of a table (there are several columns of detail information that goes along with each item's name) and each item has a radio button that the user could use to choose it. The problem is that with 50,000+ items in this table, going through the list until the program finds the one item that is checked takes forever. I know that there has to be a faster and simpler way to just return the item selected, but I can't figure out what it should be. Can any one suggest something or let me know what they used to perform something like this. I am open to most any ideas. My current limitation is using Access as the underlying database.
Thank you,
Janet

 

[Veep]

Doesn't the user have any idea what item they want before hand or is it like going shopping for the sake of going shopping and then buying something that looks nice? I'd try to narrow it down a bit by letting them select by category or even a keyword search. That's way to many radio buttons to scroll through. As a user, I would either close this window before it loaded or close it after it loaded and I realized that my next move would be to wade through 50,000 items.