Huge <select></select> statement - what's a better way to go about this?

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1

I’ve got a page that I have for users to submit a requests for work on servers. In this page I’ve got a <select></select> currently with a few hundred server names and while it’s mildly annoying to be able to multiple select server names it’s not painful. Now the possibility has arisen for having thousands of server names to pick from.

This is what I’d call “unwieldy”.

About the best option I’ve found (so far) is one of the jQuery multi-select modules that’ll let you search by name and then move the picked name over to another spot that shows it’s been selected. However, the .js that gets generated is right around 200K and even though all traffic from users that use this page is on a WAN that seems extra… beefy.

Would anybody have some sage words of advice for how to make this look just a tad bit less cumbersome…?

2

How about jQuery Tagit so people can type with auto-complete and enter multiple in a list themselves?

3

Thanks for the reply & suggestion. Since the current method the user’s have is a 15 lines select I’m not sure how well it would go over to have them type out their select for servers. I didn’t mention it originally but there could be one server name or on up to dozens of server names selected at a time.

I’m currently leaning towards the multiselect here - http://www.senamion.com/blog/jmultiselect2side.html (the first demo in particular). It’s similar enough that it’s familiar but has the search to narrow down the potential amount of choices to something less than a metric ton.