Dynamic Forms?

[TotalHosting]

Hi All.

Does anyone know of any good tutorials that show how to piece together a form that changes as you select certain options? Or a decent (read "affordable") commercial form system that does this?

If you choose one option from a drop-down, the next drop-down changes in context. Or choosing an option from a select list reveals a new set of choices altogether.

Checkboxes used to hide or show form layers ("Use same information?" Yes being the default, a "No" or check off in the box would reveal a section to add new or different information.

Similar to the sitepoint order form, but more flexible.

Then the next part of the problem would be to get all the option data from a MySQL table to populate the form fields in the first place, so you wouldn't have to hard code the whole thing. Or would hard coding it be better/easier?

Thanks.

Pete

[Dan Grossman]

I do this as part of the app sold at contactadministrator.com... there are some areas where I have dropdown boxes that determine what should be listed in the next box. One example is "Select type of user"... they select a type, then the next box shows all users of that type.

I'm not a JavaScript guru (though I could do the "use same information" thing since it doesn't require any hidden divs or populating lists).. so I did it the programming way. You can easily find the javascript that makes a dropdown box into site navigation.. where selecting an option causes hte browser to move to another URL.. so I have something like this..

<option value="http://www.mysite.com/index.php?usertype=admin">Administrators</option><option value="http://www.mysite.com/index.php?usertype=rep">Sales Reps</option>

...etc.. and the javascript handles sending the browser to the selected type. Then I just have index.php handle outputting the same page but with the 2nd dropdown box next to the user type box containing the list of appropriate users. It's not as fast as a fully javascript method, but for me, it was a lot easier to write and the only secure way to do it.

[beetle]

Check out qForms

http://www.pengoworks.com/index.cfm?action=qForms

[JSwick]

Two great scripts:

go to http://www.quirksmode.org/
under the w3c DOM menu, select scripts
look at Uable forms ( which shows more form fields depending on how you answer selected form fields)
and also look at Extending forms ( which allows you to add more instances of the same form field(s) )
I use both of these together in a scheduling form. Works great.