Dynamic Dropdowns with out a submit

[epaisley]

Hi,

I'm working on something that requires you to have menu driven options, meaning the selection in dropdown menu 1, drives what is show in dropdown menu 2. The catch is I need to be able to populate dropdown menu 2 with out actually submiting the page. So i figured I would create something in Javascript that creates arrays (using coldfusion), then populates the menu with those arrays. I can't quite seem to get something to work. Does anyone have any code snippets or skelton code that does this? One "gotchya" I seem to run into is the fact that my select option value is different from what the option displays (ie <option value="1">Ford</option> )

Thanks for your help!

[rich_explus]

Have you tried populating the second drop-down with empty <OPTION> elements in a quantity sufficient for your needs, then retroactively altering their properties as a result of the selection in the first pull-down? That's where I'd start.

Another idea would be to have your CF code output all the complete <SELECT> boxes you'll need, but hide the second-tier ones until they're called on by the first-tier menu. I think show/hide is a little tricky with form elements, though. I know I did it in an intranet setting once, where i had control of the end user's browser choice; one div had the first form, the second div had the second form, and there was some JS necessary to show/hide and transfer info from the first form to the second. If you can get these techniques to work, you can get a very clean, quick "false submit" between steps 1 & 2, but I never had to try to code cross-browser for that trick. If you'd like, I can find the code I used for that and send it to you. Or better yet, you could try it with the sliding code in the CBE library at www.cross-browser.com .

Why are you so dead-set against submitting the form in between? I know there's a latency issue, but it's bound to be cleaner and more universally functional than what you're trying here. I'm one of those developers who thinks that Javascript needs to be used sparingly and only for good reason....

--Rich

[epaisley]

I know for a fact that users will only be using IE as a browser so i don't need to worry about cross browser functionality.

I would really appreciate if you could send me the code! That could be really useful. Please send it to epaisley@hotmail.com

Thanks!

[epaisley]

Thanks rich_explus !! Your help was key to getting to pointing me in the right direction!!! Thanks again

[r937]

epaisley, if all your users are using IE, then you must be on an intranet, so go ahead and make a round trip to the server

here's another example of javascript-driven related selects:
http://evolt.jeffhowden.com/jeff/cod...ed_selects.cfm

by the way, rich, my first impression of that cross-browser site was very unfavourable, i could not scroll over to read the start of each line of text!! (see attachment)

[r937]

hmmm, attachment did not come through after about an hour, let's try again

Edit: i get the message "You have already attached this file to a post. If you need to refer to this file it can be found in this thread: Dynamic Dropdowns with out a submit" -- what's up with that, and how come it doesn't show??