Mark default item selected in select box in form

carisi_2000

I have this select box to insert data into a mysql database, when editing this information, the user clicks on a hyperlink and the data populates the rest of the form, but the select box only shows the default. How can I tell it to mark the option item "selected"?

<SELECT NAME="deptid" SIZE="1"><?
while ($myrow2 = mysql_fetch_array($result2))
{
echo "<option value=".$myrow2["deptid"].">";
echo $myrow2["department"];
echo "</option>";
}
?>
</select>

irish

Basically, you need to check each option possible against the one you wish to have selected. For instance, if this is so you can have the proper Department ID selected on a form that represents a particular user, you will need to have a variable that represents the users deptid (or whatever criteria you are using to determine what needs to be selected), and check that against all the available options that make up that list, and then simply put "selected" in the option tag when the match is made.

Does that help? If not maybe a little more detail about what the script is trying to do would help 🙂

carisi_2000

That is exactly what I want to do, I just can't seem to figure out how to do it.

irish

Well, I will assume your script has some way of figuring out who a user is when they visit this page. Once you are able to do that, you just query and store the data for a user.

So, in your case you may have a table with the following columns for each user:

uid
name
deptid

And a seperate table that contains a list of all possible departments, that may look like this:

deptid
department

When you put the two together, the users deptid column will match exactly one row in the Departments table. This is the item that you want selected. To do that, we can first do something like this to gather the data needed:

<?php

/* gather useful info, connect to db, etc... */
$db = ...;
$id = ...;

/* get all the users data */
$userQuery = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE uid = $id";
$userResult = mysql_query($userQuery,$db);
$userData = mysql_fetch_row($userResult,$db);
list($uid,$uname,$udept) = $userData;

/* get a list of departments */
$deptQuery = "SELECT * FROM Departments";
$deptResult = mysql_query($deptQuery,$db);
while ($deptData = mysql_fetch_row($deptResult,$db))
{
	$depts[] = Array("deptid"=>$deptData[0],"deptname"=>$deptData[1]);
}

?>

Now that all the data is together, you can use it to mark off a select box later in the script when doing the display routines:

<!-- html header and form stuff above here -->

<select name="deptid"><?php

foreach($depts as $key=>$data)
{
	if ($udept == $data["deptid"])
	{
		echo("<option value=\"".$data["deptid"]."\" selected>".$data["deptname"]."</option>");
	}
	else
	{
		echo("<option value=\"".$data["deptid"]."\">".$data["deptname"]."</option>");
	}
}

?></select>

<!-- html footer down here -->

So what happens is the script knows that the user who requested the page has a department ID of, say, "12". So, while it is writing out each <option> group, it checks the corresponding department id for a match, and if found, makes it "selected".