Populating Select Menus

obrienkev

I want to populate 5 different select menus in the one form from 5 relevant tables.

i.e. the contact menu will be populated by the contact table,
the client menu will be populated by client table,
etc.

How is this done??

Thank You.

Kevin.

rachel2004

Perform your query of the 'contacts' table as you normally would. You dind't specify your rdbms name, but in my example, I'll assume MySQL:

<?php 
$firstName = array();
$lastName  = array();
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
	$fistName[] = $row['firstNameColumn'];
	$lastName[] = $row['lastNameColumn'];
}

$count = count($firstName);

echo '<form name="myForm" id="myForm" method="post" action="myFormHandler.php">
      <select name="myDropDownMenu" id="myDropDownMenu">';
echo '<option value="-1">Pleaes choose a contact</option>';
for ($i=0; $i<$count; $i++) {
	echo '<option value="'.$i.'">'.$firstName[$i].' '.$lastName[$i].'</option>';
}
echo '</select>
      </form>';

?>

obrienkev

Using MySQL.

I will have multiple select menus on the one form so how do I populate these menus from each relevant table??

Your query seems to go for populating just one menu.

bike5

echo '<form name="myForm" id="myForm" method="post" action="myFormHandler.php">
<select name="myDropDownMenu" id="myDropDownMenu">';
while ($r = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
echo "<option value=$WHATEVERTHEVALUEWILLBE>$r[COLUMNINTABLE] $r[COLUMNINTABLE]</option>";
}
echo '</select>
<select name="myDropDownMenu2" id="myDropDownMenu2">';
while ($r = mysql_fetch_array($result2))
{
echo "<option value=$WHATEVERTHEVALUEWILLBE>$r[COLUMNINTABLE] $r[COLUMNINTABLE]</option>";
}
echo '</select>

  </form>';

just copy and paste from the start of the select to the end 3 more times and change which query its getting the info from and the name of the select menu.

obrienkev

Anything tidier - code wise??

rachel2004

If you have 5 different tables and you want to create 5 different dropdown menus, you can perform 5 separate queries or you can do one query, but use JOIN statements to create one large result set.

Once you you have that large result set, it's only a matter of using the example I gave you (or the one from bike 5) for each dropdown menu you want to create.