Re: How to add elements to a JList without preventing refresh

Rhino wrote:
Do you REALLY plan to make your user have to scroll through a JList with a MILLION entries in it? That seems like a very poor design to me. Couldn't you break the entries into categories so that the user can "drill down" to it in stages?

A million entries a pixel each wouldn't require any scrolling on a decent screen. I suspect that the figure of a million was just being extreme, and in fact there would be fewer, heavier entries.

For instance, if I wanted my user to choose from a million town or city names from all over the world, I would NOT simply present a million names of towns and cities: I'd let them choose the continent, then the country, then the state or province, and then the town; that would keep each list, except possibly the last one, reasonably brief.

These days, I'd let the user type it and simultaneously search, in a modern google style. Even for a long name it's easy. I can type "harbertonford" without thinking. There can't be that many Harbertonfords in the world. In fact, there probably aren't many places starting with "harb".

Can you do something like this in your user interface? Otherwise, I think your user is going to be VERY unhappy with your GUI design. Your job might get a little harder if you have to present multiple lists in the appropriate sequence but each list should be a lot more manageable than having to deal with a million-element list.

If the user can incrementally search, then it shouldn't really be a problem (although the scroll bar might be a little inappropriate). However, my guess is that a million is an exaggeration.

Tom Hawtin
--
Unemployed English Java programmer
http://jroller.com/page/tackline/
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