Hi, I am looking for a lighter weight alternative to the HTML Select tag (i.e. dropdownlist). Here's why: I have a page that has to load hundreds (up to 500) of select boxes at once and it's taking forever to load them. I figure that the sheer number of dropdownlists that have to be rendered on the client-side is bogging the pageload down. Does anyone know of a lightweight alternative that I could use that might take less time to load up? I did find something at http://support.milonic.com/demos/sel...etSelected.htm that might work, but I'm not sure. Any alternative I implement still needs to be able to support the onchange dom event.

Thanks,
Dave Durose

The select element is the select element. There is no lightweight alternitive, infact the example you posted would take longer to load since it is JavaScript .

I would suggest breaking up the page into a number of smaller sub pages, if that is a possibility. If you explained some more of the context behind why you need 500 select boxes at once in a site then perhaps I could suggest a viable alternative.

Jamie

500 select boxes !??

Man, learn about DOM scripting, and reduce your drop down quantity.
As Jamie said, there is nothing lighter than the native select box...

What you can face is the time needed either to load all the data (not much likely anyway, considering today pc and connectivity) or the time the browser takes to format and display all those infos, and this is most certainly where you have a problem.

Split your page in section, and make an AJAX request loading of the select you don't need to have at first on the page.
This will mostly be your only solution...

The only thing I can think of that might help you is to load only the row(s) of dropdown lists that you need at the time, and cycle through them using a Javascript event handler (onchange, onblur, onfocus).

Depends on ultimately what you're trying to do.

Thanks guys. I realize that it's a bad idea to try and load up 500 select boxes at once. I was handed this design by someone else and now I've got to be the "cleanup" guy and improve the performance. I like the idea of "paging" the select boxes so that I'm only showing a subset of the total number of select boxes at a time and as the user scrolls down AJAX calls happen that pull the next set of select boxes. Could anyone help me with getting started on that? I should also mentioned that I'm working with PHP files. You're right also that it'll probably take just as long to load up the javascript associated with the solution from milonic.com. I'm just trying to think of alternatives.

Trust me - I would love to not have so many darn select boxes on the page. I'm kinda limited by the design though. The client needs to be able to select 1 of 5 possible comments for each item (and there are hundreds of items). And when they change the select box, an AJAX call happens that updates their comment in the database for that item. I would love to break the pages up in subpages, but I don't think that would work based on the current design on the website. They need to be able to see everything at once.

I was just wondering if any of you guys knew of a quick and dirty alternative that would emulate a select box.