How to design a multiple choice form for a lot of entries?

Hey everybody and this is my first posting (btw I’ve been looking for months for that kind of forum:))),

so some details: I am about to create a multiple choice for many entries - in my case “cities” around the world. I am not sure how to design it. I have created already a form for countries and there are a lot of them :slight_smile: Now I am thinking about a form for cities (site is about telco infrastructure so the user can pick the city, where his equipment is located). I was thinking about a regular text field, so the user can use a comma to separate the entries - so anybody can filter for it later on. I don’t think that a drop-down menu with a multiple choice and with all the cities around the world would be so much user-friendly. Any other suggestions?

The trouble with a textfield is that the user is not prevented from making typos, or getting creative with the use of uppercase/lowercase letters.

Could you use a database resource of cities from somewhere, and use javascript to only display the cities AFTER the user has selected the country. That would cut way down on the number of cities to choose from.

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If you collect the information that way you would need to:

  1. split the list into separate cities to be saved as separate records and
  2. validate each against a list of all the valid city names before saving them.
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Hi Webmachine, and thanks a lot for answering. The challenge is - there are still too many cities. Additionally as I will work with professionals, I hope they will stick to the correct writing of the cities, otherwise, they will not be found from others. It is in their interest to write those cities correctly.

Might it be a problem that what is “correct” for one might not be the same as what is “correct” for another?

Probably not a problem if members are from a single country.

But using countries as an example, all of these pairs are correct.

Spain - España
Germany - Deutschland
Italy - Italia

This may be so, but IMHO having a textarea as the input is much more likely to cause problems than a predefined set of choices.

Maybe a combination of both?

For example, a select for existing entries and a text field if the users option hasn’t been entered yet.

Unfortunately, I don’t know even one site where I could see how they did it. But predefined option for so many cities… sounds crazy to me :confused:

only if you have forgotten to validate what they entered and get them to correct any that they mistyped.

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