Our New Combobox Component

Announcements
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Hey everyone! I want to share some exciting news about a UX improvement we’ve been working on that started from a pretty frustrating problem.

The Problem That Started It All

So this whole thing began when we kept running into issues with Jira integrations. When you’re sending issues to Jira and need to select an assignee, the Jira API has a limitation where it only returns 50 results max - no pagination, no way to get a complete user list. For teams with more than 50 people, you’d either get stuck with whoever happened to be in those first 50 results, or you’d have to leave the field blank and assign it later in Jira. Super annoying.

Our solution was to add filtering that returns the top 50 results based on what the user types. So now you can actually find any assignee by just starting to type their name, even if your team has hundreds of users.

Making It Bigger

But then we realized - why stop at Jira assignees? We had similar issues all over the app, where long select lists were either tedious to scroll through or, in odd cases, crashed Dradis when dealing with massive datasets.

So we decided to go all-in and build a proper combobox component that could replace select elements app-wide.

What We Built

Our new combobox handles all the good stuff:

  • Filtering - Type to narrow down options instantly

  • Multi-select - Choose multiple items with a nice tag-style display

  • Remote data sources - Load options on-demand from APIs

  • Infinite scroll - Handle massive lists without performance hits

  • Grouped options - Keep things organized with optgroups

  • Manual input - Add custom values when needed

  • Rich rendering - Icons, colors, and custom styling

The best part? It’s built 100% in-house with zero dependencies. We wanted full control over the experience and performance.

The Results

Demo of combobox component

Selecting options from long lists is now way easier, faster, and more intuitive. No more endless scrolling, no more crashes, and definitely no more “I’ll just assign this later” workarounds.

We’re still iterating and improving the component before we roll it out to replace 100% of selects in the app, but the early feedback has been really positive.