Interactive Report (IR) column heading: filtered items number & flashlight

Question

Hello everyone
several hours of searching through the forum did not provide me with leads or answers to 2 questions. Both are related to the IR column heading menu and options. Let's start with a copy of the relevant portion of the interactive report help screen:
Column Heading Menu
Clicking on any column heading exposes a column heading menu.
[snip]
Text Area is used to enter case insensitive search criteria (no need for wild cards). Entering a value will reduce the list of values at the bottom of the menu. You can then select a value from the bottom and the selected value will be created as a filter using '=' (e.g. column = 'ABC'). Alternatively, you can click the flashlight icon and the entered value will be created as a filter with the 'LIKE' modifier (e.g. column LIKE '%ABC%').
List of Unique Values contains the first 500 unique values that meet your filters. If the column is a date, a list of date ranges is displayed instead. If you select a value, a filter will be created using '=' (e.g. column = 'ABC').
Q1: Why do I not see a flashlight icon? I looked everywhere in the report definition to "enable" it, to no avail.
Q2: Although we've found IRs to be incredibly useful and embraced by end users, we are having issues when dealing with large datasets. Let's look at searching for people's first/last name in our CONTACTS table. The table is ~28,000 names long. If one attempts to use Column Heading menu to "filter" for any name outside the first 500 unique values, the search does not work. Yes, I know that a workaround is to use Actions Menu icon filter... but, it sure is misleading to have a search which does not go beyond letter B in the list of last names. Furthermore, I do not see a way to DISABLE Column Heading Text Area, and avoid user confusion.
I suspect that "List of Unique Values contains the first 500 unique values" was set for the performance purposes. Is there a way to set that number anywhere? Have it customized for each column? (columns county and state could be <100, for example)
Thanks an advance to any advice.
Vojin

Answer 1

@Prabodh: what you say is only changing the default image for the column selector at the search bar level. What i think is being looked for is an icon on the popup when a column header is clicked in an IR. Don't bother: there is none.
@Vojin, Tonibony:
I also ran into this problem with IRs and the useless column header box. If you want to hide the unique values list, it is a bother. First of all, you can't disable the finding of values, this is embedded in the widget ajax code. Then if you want to just hide the list, there is no real event you can hook up to. The poping up of the box is an ajax callback, and is part of the IR javascript, but this callback does not trigger any event (no apexafterrefresh for example, which is understandable). I've worked around this by overriding/extending the method which is called when ajax is done loading within the IR code. Here is a piece of code which does this (call it on page load):
   // _Finished_Loading is called when the IR is done with a GET action
   // because the posts are synchronous in this report, and no events
   // or hooks are available, the best way to preserve functionality
   // yet extending it is to override the original function, yet
   // keep the base code
   // apexafterrefresh cant be used since it is not triggered after
   // the widget ajax
   var or_Finished_Loading = gReport._Finished_Loading;
   gReport._Finished_Loading = function(){
       //overriden, but still have to call orinigal!
      or_Finished_Loading();
      //SORT_WIDGET is the widget containing all the header elements
      if(gReport.current_control=='SORT_WIDGET'){
         // hide the original dropdown box
         $("#apexir_rollover_content").hide();
   };If you're interested, i've recently developed a plugin for use in my interactive reports which works around some of these limitations. For me, the headers are much more userfriendly than the actions > filter menu. So what i've done is: hide the orignal dropdown, and turn the searchfield into an autocompletion field, which will progressively search through the distinct column values in the IR with ajax. I've even made an option to have the searching behave like a "contains" or a "like". I'm working on a post about it, with background, documentation and source code. I'll add a post here when i finish it up, you can see if that helps you.
I also would like to add a button later on which will simply add the entered value as a "like %value%" filter. I know how to do this and what to do, i'm just a bit short on time at the moment. I actually think that adding the button in the layout may be the hardest part... :')