I have a highly normalized database that has a lot of foriegn key references to a central Contact. For example there can be a team, and there will be a team contact. There can be an event, and multiple event contacts, there can be tasks with contact assigned to them. All those reference one contact table because if the contact for  an event is also assigned a task and their email changes we don't have to change it in multiple places. So far so good.

The problem is there are over 50,000 people in the "contacts" table. I can't just load these guys up in a dropdownlist. My current search mode is to display search lists using soundex which keeps the list to something manageable. The issue is I think what I need is a "contact selection control" that I would use in all the locations where a contact was needed. This control would initially be populated with the firstname and last name for the contact along with the contact id and would display the full name (a display name formatted based on contact type). This control would need to have input boxes for firstname and lastname to allow changing the soundex selection values to repopulate the dropdownlist.

Now that seems doable, but honestly I've never done that in the DNN framework so some advise on a good example to look at to build one would be appreciated.