Pascal,

The golden rule of C/S development is to minimize the about of traffic going across the wire. Pulling back the entire table is generally not a good idea, unless you're going to cache it on the client.

For your specific scenario, most people would agree that your customer search screen should allow the user to specify criteria to limit the return record count. For customers, I would expect to see an entry for lastname, company name, city, state - that kind of thing. The query would use the supplied data to retrieve a list of customers. By appending a % and using the LIKE operator, you can give your users the ability to specify only a couple of characters get partial matches.


>This is a general question about interface design when using C/S. I posed it several times on the UT but so far I didn't get much answer to it :

You've asked a pretty general question. I think you'll find that you get better answers to specific questions.

-Mike