Other alternative for long drop down list

[fredyap1234]

Hi guys,

 

I have a form and in this form is a long drop down list which is called category. Problem is that this drop down list is somewhat long and I felt that users may take a long time to scroll and read through each category before they pick one.

 

Previously, I used a text box to get the category from users before saving it into database. But however, there is a consistency issue.

 

For example, a user may specify category as "jack and jill" while others may specify it as "jack & jill". (One use the word 'and', while the other used the ampersand symbol.) As such it is not very consistent and I have switched to using drop down list.

 

But over time, the category drop down list grew in size and it's somewhat annoying to go through the whole list to pick a category from the drop down.

 

So I would like to ask you guys for opinion if there are other alternative for long drop down list? I'm thinking of alternatives like autocomplete, etc. What do you guys think of it?

 

Thanks in advance.

[xangelo]

I recently ran into a similar issue with an application I was developing. I ended up going with a combination of dropdown, auto-complete and input field. When typing into the input field, it queried a hidden dropdown to eliminate querying the database. It then showed those results. If a user continued typing something different it would still accept the value they had given.

 

I just included a link for them to browse all available categories if they wanted to, but this method seems to cater to all my users needs.