Question

I have a form with a ChoiceField in it. It is rendered to the user as a dropdown box.

Problem is, I have thousands of entries in this field, which is causing the page to (a) load very slowly and (b) be sluggish.

I want an alternative widget, instead of Select, that could handle more than 10,000 choices.

Something like the admin’s raw_id_fields would be good (if only it were usable in general forms…) but I’m open to ideas.

Answer 1

If autocomplete is an option for your UI you can take a look to django-simple-autocomplete:

App enabling the use of jQuery UI autocomplete widget for
ModelChoiceFields with minimal configuration required.

EDITED (reply OP comment)

I have not tested this solution, but digging documentation and source it seems that not all data is loaded at a time:

The ability to specify an URL for the widget enables you to hook up to
other more advanced autocomplete query engines if you wish.

Source code:

def get_json(request, token):
    """Return matching results as JSON"""
            ...
            di = {'%s__istartswith' % fieldname: searchtext}     # <- look here!
            items = queryset.filter(**di).order_by(fieldname)[:10]

Widget source code

$("#id_%(name)s_helper").autocomplete({
    source: function(request, response){
        $.ajax({                                  # <-- look here
            url: "%(url)s",
            data: {q: request.term},
            success: function(data) {