dhtmlxCombo - single data source

I am using a dhtmlxCombo control many times on a page (it holds names).

I have multiple combos on the page and they all need to hold the same set of names from which the user can select one.

The way I have implemented it works but it is not terribly efficient for I have defined a combo for each control and pointed to the same XML file.

Is there a way of specifying that the control is a dhtmlxCombo and that the source of the information comes from an XML file but the data for the XML file is only stored once on the page.

Currently, I have 27 combos on the page and it takes ages to load the page because as far as I can tell, it is loading the data from the XML file 27 times!!

There must be a better way to do this so some guidance would be appreciated.

Different instances of combo doesn’t share xml cache, so it highly possible that each instance load the xml file again.
You can workaround problem as

dhtmlxAjax.get(“data.php”,function(response){
var combo1 = new …
combo1.loadXMLString(response.xmlDoc.responseText);
var combo2 = new …
combo2.loadXMLString(response.xmlDoc.responseText);

})

as result data will be loaded only once, and shared between all combos