How to group strings by prefix

Posted by namenlos on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by namenlos
Published on 2010-04-08T09:27:55Z Indexed on 2010/04/08 9:33 UTC
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grouping

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names

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prefix

I am writing a Winform UI in which the user must select a single customer. (For reasons beyond my control I am limited to a UI that uses dropdown lists, text fields, checkboxes, radiobuttons only -i.e. no fancy special UI controls)

The situation

There are a lot of customers (a thousand for example)
If i put all the customers in a single dropdown there's no way it will be easy for a customer to even see all the customers. Also the it will take too long to retireve all the customers from the DB to populate the dropdown
My thought is to have two combo box, the first lists groups of the customers by their last name something like a phone book "Aa-Ac", "Ad-Ade", "Adf-B", when selecting the first combo box, it scope the second one to a managable set customer names (no more than for example 40 names)

The question

I need a reasonable way of grouping their names such that it will be clear to customer which group contains the name. I.e. given a group of names I need to bucketize then int "Aa-Ac".

Comments

I don't need to solve the general problem of an immense number of names - we know based on our data that 1000 names is the max our users will encounter.
If there are other techniques please do share, but I am interested specifically in an answer to my specific question around how to determine the buckets ("Aa-Ac", etc.)

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