[AccessD] Listbox-type browse control for large dataset

Hi Chris

We've used a subform designed to mimic a Listbox for a similar purpose.
However, the list counted about a hundred records - as several have mentioned, browsing ten thousand records is, ehh, not optimal.

/gustav

>>> cjeris at fas.harvard.edu 01-08-2007 23:36 >>>
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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?

thanks, Chris Jeris