Looking quickly at the code for AbstractSelect, it appears to just call getItemIds on the container no matter what, and does not have a paging/lazy behaviour that would fetch more only when the user scrolls beyond the visible items, or uses filtering.
What would be a good way (add-on would be fine too) to let a user select a value from a largish dataset (30000 product codes, for example) while typing the code and ultimately letting him select from the list ? The codes vary in length, so I can’t easily switch from “you must type” to “you can select”.
The current user-level behaviour of select is fine but I need more scaleable.
This is covered by
ticket #4233 , currently targeted for Vaadin 6.6.
In the meanwhile, if you do need lazily loading selection from huge data sets, one option would be using a text field for the filter criterion and a single-column table - either directly in the layout or in a popup.