[AccessD] Listbox-type browse control for large dataset

Chris,

Presumably the data in the listbox is ordered according to a 
human-readable field?  If so, would it be feasible to put an unbound 
textbox on the form, and have the user enter the first few characters of 
this field?  If so, you could leave the listbox unpopulated until this 
textbox contains a minimum number of characters, and then use code at 
that point to assign/modify the listbox's RowSource.  I expect that 
having a filtered row source would speed up your step #2.

Regards
Steve


Christopher Jeris wrote:
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> Hi everybody,
> 
> I have a form on which I'd like to provide a listbox-type browse control
> on a dataset with a large number of rows (tens of thousands).
> Specifically, the user interface control for this dataset needs to
> support the following interactions:
> 
> 1. Allow the user to click on a row, or select it using arrow keys, to
> bring that row up in a form for editing
> 2. Recenter the control's viewable area around a specific row which is
> known by key (not by ordinal in the listbox's dataset)
> 3. Ideally, browse from top to bottom of the entire dataset using a
> scroll bar, although this can be weakened if necessary
> 
> In our prototype, we are using a regular ListBox, and the problem is
> that #2 -- that is, selecting a row using
>   box.Value = someRowKey
> is too slow, perhaps almost a second with 50,000 rows.  Also, I have no
> idea whether there is a hard limit (2^16?) on the number of rows in a
> ListBox.
> 
> I have searched briefly for third-party ActiveX controls, but the only
> likely candidate I've seen -- FarPoint ListPro -- doesn't seem to work
> in Access, only standalone VB.  (As in, I tried it, and I can't get it
> to work.)
> 
> At this point I'm looking at implementing "paging" by hand, that is,
> binding a set of a few hundred records at a time to the listbox and
> forcing the user to make transitions from one page to the next explicitly.
> 
> Can anyone suggest alternative ways to attack the problem?
>