I have a popup list for a list of customers. When I select a customer it pre-fills in several other fields. The problem is that the customer list is about 3000 names long.

I have found that once the list comes up I can hit a key on the keyboard and it first takes me to the start of the "Z" names reguardless of which key I hit. If I hit a key again, say the "H" key it takes me to the start of the "H" customers but there might be 100 or more of them.

Is there a way that when the popup list comes up you can start to type the customer name and the list will highlight that customer based on what was typed.

Example:
Type "H" takes you to the start of the "H"
Then type "A" takes you to the first "HA"
Then type "R" takes you to the first "HAR" ect.

Thanks in advance

Hi LDR.

The key here is to select your customers from a portal instead of a pop-up list. You can show the portal in place of the pop up list, or in a mini window brought up just for this purpose.

You can the filter the portal as you're suggesting, by part of the customer's last name. Basically, the left side of your portal relationship would be a global text field into which you'd type "H" or "Ha", etc. The right side of your relationship would be a new calculation field in the customer table which would be true for all partial spellings of the customer's last name. Like this:

Left ( LastName ; 1 ) & ¶ &
Left ( LastName ; 2 ) & ¶ &
Left ( LastName ; 3 ) & ¶ &
etc.

You can even follow this with a similar set of Lefts on the customer's company name, so that you can type in that or a person's last name. Be sure to define this field to return the type text.

While this will easily let you filter thousands of names, you have to exit the global field before the portal reflects your typing. Not terrible, but if you want to see an absolutely elegant way to do this without having to leave the field, check out Ray Cologon's example here...

http://www.nightwing.com.au/FileMaker/Clairvoyance/

... very -.

Hope that helps,

John