Long List Issues

I am trying to get a list of all towns in the state (NH) to work in a drop down DCL. (a total of 247 names)

The problem is if I save the Town Name or Placement number in list to a file, then try to retrieve from the file and reappear in the DCL as the Default it will not work after the 212th town Name. All is fine up to the 212 name, after that the Drop Down comes up blank. The record in the saved data file is correct, there is some issue with the conversion after the 212th name.

Any suggestions on how to deal with this issue....

Update;

I tried to break the list in half and dealing with the issue that way. (performing and add_list at the DCL call)

Still the same results, the DCL does not like list over 212 elements apparently.

Open to suggestions.....

Why not select alphabetically via drop down/list box or something similar?

Example: The drop down could contain the alphabet and the list box could be populated according to the drop down selection...

jvillarreal, I have thought of something very similar, I am breaking up the Town list by County, so the town list will be populated per county. It reduces the actual town list considerably,m which should make it manageable. Now I just need to created the lisp code. I am not a programmer so this is taking some time, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks for the tip....

Afralisp.net has great dcl tutorials. If you'd like suggestions to modify your code, post what you've got so far.

Dont hard code your dcl with the list of the town names it would be better to use and read an external txt file you may end up with 26 a-z lots easier to code just a simple first pick. Also if you want to add more it easier also.

Thanks for the responses, I was able to break the list down by county and use one off LeeMac's lisp routines to have the town list populated based on the county selected. It works great there are not enough towns in any one county to cause any issues. And I needed the county name as well in this particular application. It took some time to produce the lists that way but the end result is great.

BIGAL I coded the list in the LISP function not the DCL, I could have done an external ASCII file however I am trying to keep as much in the LISP files as possible, so when I compile (FAS files) them they are less likely to get messed around with later by the users. Its not very likely that towns will get added to the state anytime soon.