ASP.NET MVC DropDownList alternative

Question

I'm using a dropdownlist for a field on a form, but with large amount of data retrieving from the server, makes the load of the page extremely slow. Do you have a solution to this problem?

Answer 1

Implement a free text like solution like:

• when the user clicks on the text input you can pop up a dialog to query the users (you can add an additional search field and then load in a table the results, add a click on a row should add the user to the main form)
• true free text expirience with deferred loading the matches like Facebook search does