Hi!

In addition to what already said, I would also like to ask if you have to search just by user name. Indeed, it is depended on how many searching criteria you give for search. If you search just for firstname/lastname, the solutions that already described here are nice. I specially like Dragan's sggestion - you can use a little box for it that pops up as soon as a list of matches found by various ways become less than 100 records. Once user types - you display that box under the textbox (better use grid for that, though listbox is nice too), like in the Internet Explorer URL bar (when you type URL, it propose all kinds of URLs from history that start from what you tiped).

However, there is a nother kind of solutions that propose users a wide range of search criteria. Usually this is a form that consists of at least 2 page frames. First page is a search page. You enter a search criteria and press button. Grid below displays sarch results prepared by a query built from the main query part and custom WHERE condition. You can double click on the grid row or select row and got to another page - record editing for that record. It is good idea to limit nuber of records returned by a query on such page (say, to 1000 records). I did managed to incorporate such searching functionality into the container class that contains a grid and functions to simplify the process of development of search page for each particular form. Making it a class also helped me a lot to move to another backend - there was no much of changes, indeed. Now I follow a list of instructions for that class and quickly build search page for any form. More, the functionality of that class is advanced to a great level - we have now search by many different criteria, allow smart search by throwing away some search fields until at least one record found and some other things.


>Hi everybody,
>
>Suppose, I have a huge list of items, say, users - more than 10000. I need to design an interface with the ability to quickly find the necessary person. What kind of interface would be convenient for this task?
>
>Thanks in advance for sharing your ideas.