4 Ways to Handle Large Datasets in Gravity Forms
Need a Gravity Forms Drop Down to handle hundreds — or even thousands — of choices? Here are four ways to make it happen.
- Do all those choices actually need to live in one field?
- 1. Raise the limit
- 2. Make thousands of choices searchable
- 3. Get clean, unique results from large lists
- 4. Pull from multiple database tables at once
- The limit does not exist
Got a Drop Down field with thousands of choices to manage? Totally doable.
But adding them one by one isn’t practical, especially if that list keeps getting updated. A better approach is to keep your data somewhere outside your form, like a spreadsheet or a database table, and connect it to your field with Populate Anything — it pulls everything in as choices automatically.
Once you start pulling from a real dataset though, size starts to matter. And depending on how large it gets, there are a few ways to handle it. But first…
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Do all those choices actually need to live in one field?
Sometimes, the answer is no. By default, Populate Anything caps results at 500 at a time, and for good reason — to keep your forms fast. So if your data naturally breaks into smaller groups, you can chain your dropdown fields instead, where picking something in one field narrows down what shows up in the next.
Think country, then state, then city, instead of one long scrollable list. Each list stays smaller, and the 500 cap may never come up.
But if chaining doesn’t fit your data, or one field really needs to hold 500+ choices, here are four ways to handle it with Populate Anything.
1. Raise the limit
If your dataset is just past the 500 mark, there’s a quick fix for that — a hook, which is a small snippet of code you install using a plugin like Code Snippets, that tells Populate Anything to show more than 500 results.
Show snippet
To use: swap 123 with your form ID, 4 with your field ID, and 1000 with the limit you need.
add_filter( 'gppa_query_limit_123_4', function( $query_limit, $object_type ) {
return 1000;
}, 10, 2 );Need to apply this to all your fields, or only fields pulling from a specific source like Posts or Users? The docs have versions for that too.
New to hooks? Check out our wizard’s guide to using hooks.
We’ve seen this work in support. One customer was building a vehicle make/model selector, populating from a spreadsheet with over 700 rows. Raising the limit was all it took.
One thing to keep in mind: showing more results uses more memory, so it’s best to apply the fix to the one field that needs it, rather than every dropdown on the form.
2. Make thousands of choices searchable
If your dropdown needs to hold thousands of choices, loading them all at once isn’t ideal for performance. Instead, the field can wait until the user starts typing and fetch only the matching results.
To do this, you’ll need Advanced Select, which turns your standard dropdown into a search box. Pair it with Populate Anything, and only matching results load as you type instead of everything at once.
One great real-world example of this is a Spotlight we wrote about a musician who used this exact setup to make 40,000+ albums instantly searchable.
3. Get clean, unique results from large lists
Heads up
This section only applies when your field pulls directly from a database table. If you’re populating from Posts, Users, or Entries, feel free to skip ahead.
Populate Anything’s Only Show Unique Results setting does what it says — but only within the first 500 rows it fetches. Any unique values past that point won’t appear.
Raising the query limit works, but with a large dataset, that can come at a real performance cost. To avoid that trade-off, use our snippet to fetch only unique values you actually need.
Here’s the snippet. Just install it using a plugin like Code Snippets and you’re good to go.
Show snippet
add_filter( 'gppa_object_type_database_query', function( $query, $args, $db_object_type ) {
global $wpdb;
$order_by = rgars( $args, 'ordering/orderby' );
$template_value = rgars( $args, 'templates/value' );
$template_label = rgars( $args, 'templates/label' );
$are_all_same = count( array_unique( array( $order_by, $template_value, $template_label ) ) ) === 1;
if ( $are_all_same ) {
// %i is a valid placeholder as of WP 6.2
// phpcs:ignore
$query = str_replace( 'SELECT *', $wpdb->prepare( 'SELECT DISTINCT %i', $order_by ), $query );
}
return $query;
}, 10, 3 );Note: make sure your Ordering, Value, and Label settings are all set to the same column for the snippet to work.
We’ve seen this come up in support. A customer was populating city and school-name fields from a large database, and some options simply weren’t appearing, even with Only Show Unique Results enabled. Turns out, that’s exactly what our snippet is for. 😉
4. Pull from multiple database tables at once
Heads up
This section only applies when your data lives across multiple database tables. If you’re populating from Posts, Users, Entries, or a single table, feel free to skip ahead.
Sometimes the data a large dropdown needs lives in more than one place — like orders in one table, customer details in another.
To make it easier for Populate Anything to pull from both, you can combine them into a database view, which treats them as a single source.
It does involve some database work, so feel free to reach out to a support wizard if it feels too advanced. 🧙🏼
Key Takeaways
- Populate Anything limits query results to 500 items by default, to keep forms fast
- There are four ways to work past that limit, and the right one depends on your data source and how large the dataset is
- When users need to search through thousands of choices, Advanced Select is the best fit
- When your data is spread across multiple database tables, a database view lets Populate Anything read them as a single source
The limit does not exist
You don’t have to pick just one approach. A few of these options can work together in the same form.
Got a dataset that refuses to behave? Drop a comment below — we love a good weird form problem. 🔮
We’re using (and abusing) Populate Anything for a dataset containing ca. 13k possible combinations over 8 fields, for a complex health workers union where we need to ensure those joining us are in fact covered by one of the 50+ collective agreements we manage across 32 employers. The initial field is a drop-down for employer, followed by 7 fields conditional on the choice in the one prior. (Region, Location, Workplace, Profession, Professional Title, Specialty, Division). We are using Gravity Forms Entries as the data reference, with those 13k combinations loaded as entries on a different form. When a new profession is added, a professional title is changed, or a new agreement expands coverage to a new region or workplace for example, we can find and delete those entries, and then use the import entries tool to replace with the updated ones. We maintain a master CSV offline for this.
This works a treat and is far better than any other system we’ve tried, and our form now has a few dozen fields as opposed to the nightmare of over 400 it had before we introduced Populate Anything.
https://apex.org.nz/join/#form-apex-membership-form
Reason I’m writing, some of the fields for certain possible combinations are N/A, for which we have that actual value in place. Some are a single option only, in which case the user must select that one option. However when we set the field to auto-populate with the one option, it will do so for that field, but the process breaks after that. Populate Anything doesn’t seem to be triggered to ‘think’ about what the next field should populate with, meaning the user can’t progress. So the fix for now is we have an em dash as the placeholder in each field, and the user is required to click on it and select the one option (even if that option is N/A) before the next field then has a ‘think’ and populates with the next fields options. If there were some way to have our form autopopulate any single option fields without turning this form back into conditional spaghetti, then this current settup would be perfect! (We started with conditional stuff but the It’s only a minor roadblock and not the end of the world, but fixing it somehow would be my wish if that were possible. Or, maybe I’m doing it wrong! Regardless, thanks for a great product :)
Hey Ash,
Thanks so much for sharing! Chained GPPA setups can definitely get a bit tricky, so without seeing the existing conditional logic, it’s tough to be 100% on why your setup isn’t “thinking” properly without those em dashes.
I have a decent feeling that we could add some better default values to those single option fields, but to be sure, I’d love to give the actual setup a look.
I’ll be following up via Support so that we can learn some more here!
I’m a fully-paid Pro subscriber. I’m looking for a plugin/perk/snippet that would do exactly what this perk does except if the entry is not in the list the user can type it and enter it. Like, he starts typing “Joe…” and if there is no Joe in the database, then he can still finish out “Joe Smith” and press enter and that’s the value for that field. Thanks Wizards!
Hey Brian,
This sounds like a great use case for our “Enable ‘Add New’ Option” snippet, here. That snippet should allow your users to directly create new items that aren’t in the initial list of options.
Hoping you can give that a try, and if it gives you any trouble, please reach out via Support!