Dynamic Forms...sort of

[rheroux]

Okay, I have a little question. I'm designing a form for my business and what they want is when the customer picks their customer code from a drop down select box, it populates the rest of the form input fields except for a few select ones with their information from an already existing database.

(i.e I pick the customer code 38974 and then the address, city, state/province, postal code etc fields automatically become updated with that customer's information.)

I've figured out how to populate the customer code drop down box with every customer code, however, I'm not sure how to have it so that when they pick it, it automatically updates.

BTW, it's an odbc database, and for some reason the odbc_fetch_array() function doesn't work, so I've had to use odbc_fetch_row with a while loop to populate the customer code field.

I just started coding in PHP yesterday, and well, I'm obviously not that good yet, so any help would be much appreciated 😉

[nightowl]

It is quite difficult to do what you are looking for. Without submitting the chosen value of your select-box, you cannot change the content of the page you are looking at. So, you could do 2 things:

1) submit the first page, where the client choses his order-number and on a second page, show the fields which are filled out. You can make this process fairly transparent for the client by autosubmitting the form after they picked a value from your combobox via JavaScript. You can make it even more transparent by rebuilding the form, field filled in and giving them the same combobox again.

2) Use an IFRAME which is updated automatically (via Javascript) and where the source of the IFRAME contains the chosen value (like src="myscript.php?value=myvalue")

Hope this helps.

[Rhiannon]

I actually just did something sort of like this. I wanted a second dropdown to populate based on what was picked in the first dropdown, but I didn't want to use javascript at all or goto a second page. It's a page to search on books in my office.

I used -
onChange="this.form.submit()" and had it store the selection in a variable. The second dropdown was located in an if() statement dependent on isset() - if the variable is empty the dropdown doesn't appear, but if it is set the second dropdown populates. I can change the value of the first dropdown as many times as I want and the second dropdown always repopulates, and I don't need to use javascript or goto a new page. It just refreshes the current page. I'm not sure how you want to display your information, but I was throwing out this suggestion anyways . . . hope this helps.

[rheroux]

Thanx guys (or gals). At least I have an idea on how to go about this now. Just love it when your company pops something like this into your lap 😉

I'm a Net Admin damnit!!! Not a php programmer 🙂

[Rhiannon]

No prob there. I'm a Sys Admin . . . go figure. I guess learning the programming helps us to understand some problems. Good luck.