is there a good way to display too much information in ASP.NET?

Question

I find myself in a quandry that I think I know the solution to but I'd like to ask the field. I have an ASP.NET (C# 2.0 framework) page within a site which is used as a lookup. Standard gridview control, 5 columns of data, hyperlink for the 6th column to do something with record the user wants to select.

My question goes towards how to best display 'a possible' 100k records in that gridview? As it stands right now I'd sprout a few more gray hairs before it ever returns a rendered result. The gridview, for its realestate can display about 20 rows of data on the screen at a time, so paging the data still gives me 5000 pages. Adding in a rolodex-type search on A-Z the largest return set on 'J' gives me 35000 records (where alas 'X' only has 54).

Do I just break the rolodex up smaller or is there a better way to handle a situation like this?

thanks in advance!

edit: I already have the stored procedure which populates this set up for paging like GenericTypeTea suggested, again even with paging on 'J' that would give me 1750 pages. The reason I have that much data is that the amount of participants on the given auto policy. The admin needs to be able to search for a given name, or a partial. 'Jones' has 1209 records and 'Smith' has 2918 so even that makes for a rebust result set.

edit #2: added 'a possible' 100k, there is no guarentee that the account will have that many records, on the other hand it could have more :(

Answer 1

AutoComplete is your friend :)

Just let people enter the first 2 or 3 characters then filter your searches.

With a dataset that large I don't think paging would make that much sense.

jQuery has a nice example page AutoComplete Examples

Answer 2

Filters. Don't show that much data. Show the first x records. And beyond that, the user will need to be more precise with their search. Nobody will look through 100k records for the one they want. I'd limit it to a couple hundred at most (10 pages, 20 per page).

Advise the user how many results there were though, or give some clue so they know that there were many that aren't shown, and they need to be more specific in their search