Best practice for looking up a large number items from a list box

Question

Hi All, I'm working on an ASP.NET project where a user sets up a work order that consists of generating documents for an arbitrary number of patients.

Current UI design is as follows;

A step of setting up a work order is selecting what patients to include. During this step, user can choose to select patient sites or patients. In either case, all the sites available or all the patients available (could go up to 20K+) would be put in a listbox and the user can either select patients using the lookup textbox or manually.

This is a big hassle on many aspects, considering we have 20K patients:

• It puts a big load on the browser
• It's horrible when you have to select let's say 7000 out of 20000
• It's not very intuitive

Please let me know if you have any suggestions on how to design this better

Thanks in advance,

Emrah

Answer 1

I'd recommend using a ListBox with a ListSearchExtender, or a TextBox and Auto Complete.

As you have so many items, you'll need to filter those items. For example, you could have a DropDown with geographical regions in it. So the user would only be searching for patients in Suffolk.

The actual filter is going to be business-specific of course so it will depend on what is useful for your users.

If there are a few users who do want ALL patients you can add the option of All in the filter - at least that gives you ultimate flexibility.