Slowly started porting my App from MFC to QT (4.7.4) and came across a nasty problem ... I have a ComboBox with A LOT of items (6k approx), and while you can easily find the item by making the ComboBox editable and auto-select kicks in, the populating of it takes A LONG time (4 sec approx on my Quad-core Xeon), which is quite unacceptable (the same ComboBox in MFC fills up unnoticeable). So - a question is - what can I do to fill it up faster? I guess addItems with a QStringList might be faster, but I need the itemData with each item, as I use that as an index into other data associated with each entry.

On the side-note is it possible to display the popup with items while entering the text in the QLineEdit of the QComboBox and move the selection on the popup according to data entered (more or less like the standard Windows ComboBox)?

I know that selecting an item in a 6k list is not really friendly, but it is data, that is usually known by name, and can thus be found fast by starting to type it in. I could try to group the items by areas and add another combo to select the area first (and then populate the other ComboBox with a subset of items), but that would mean that the user has two steps to do, where one is preferred.