Use Drop-Down Lists with Rulebases

The Drop-down lists that have a large number of entries slow down the application, especially in the UI.

If your data requires a long drop-down list, consider the following strategies:

  • Create a more selective drop-down list by using the context. Consider using GROUP_ID to limit the entries for PARTICIPENT_TYPE.
  • Create cascaded drop-down lists by introducing groups. For example, the entries in the city field would depend on the state field so that you do not have to list all cities in the drop-down list. The entries in the city field are populated after state field is selected.
  • Redesign to ensure that you do not end up with fewer than 100 entries.

The Drop-down lists based on the data sources are cached during execution so they do not impact performance. Datasources with a large number of entries impact the UI performance. SQL-based data sources may provide the wrong results if data in the underlying table has changed but TIBCO MDM is not notified of the change by executing UPLOAD.

For usability and rendering purposes, limit the number of choices to fewer than 50 when defining drop boxes to represent a list of predefined choices.