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I have a field in which I want to show a drop-down which contains almost 12,000 agency codes, I am little worried about the performance of Lotus Client, I have thought of creating a configuration view and then using dbcolumn I can bring the values in the filed (quite traditional), but I am not sure if this can handle the amount of data (12,000), will it not slow down the process.

Can anyone suggest some better solution so that performance may not be any issue.

Naveen
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Himanshu
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    I think you'll probably hit the limit of the @DbColumn return size. But also, it just seems to me that 12,000 is just too many for a user to deal with in a single drop-down. Is there a way you could break it up into a series of drop-downs that narrow down the choices? – Richard Schwartz Apr 23 '13 at 16:28
  • @DialogBox() will help you for this – Ramkumar Apr 24 '13 at 03:37
  • Rethink your idea. From UX point of view, user will spend a lot of time to find anything within 12k values. So if they are used to enter some code, provide edit box with validation/autocomplete feature. If they have to pick values, provide picklist/dialog box with filter/search. Combo box (drop-down) is the worst option, I think. – Frantisek Kossuth Apr 24 '13 at 12:18
  • If you have been working with Lotus Notes for 3 years, as your profile says, I am sure you heard about (and probably experienced) the 32 kB limit in @DbDolumn/@DbLookup, which translates to 16K characters... – Karl-Henry Martinsson Apr 25 '13 at 13:08

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I think you might want to consider using a button that calls @PickList instead. See here for more info.

Richard Schwartz
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Create a field and select type as Dialog list. And select Use view dialog for choices

Note:- DbColumn will throw error if the return value exceeds 32k.

You can also use @PickList.

Ramkumar
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  • I can confirm that this works, I had an issue with a lookup failing and switching to a view dialog worked great. Other than looking slightly different the end result worked basically identical to what was there before. – Zach Jan 08 '14 at 15:43
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I imagine the biggest bottleneck would appear if the view index needs to be refreshed when you display the list of values. I suppose testing will reveal that quickly, and I suppose it won't matter whether you use a pick list that displays a view or you use the @DBColumn method you mentioned.

I'm not sure what to expect, and performance might not be that bad. But if the performance is an issue, you could use scheduled agents to read all the values from the view and store them in a profile document. You may need to use several fields to store all the values given the 32KB limit, but then your dialog list formula should just be reading a few fields from a profile document, which should be pretty fast.

Ken Pespisa
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