design question?

[cornercuttinjoe]

i just need to some help in what direction to go.

say i have a form that has 20 text boxes and 5 drop down boxes. now say these drop down boxes are populated from the database.

now say there isn't an option in one of these drop down boxes that the user wants/needs, so they need to add an option to this drop down box.

i want to put a link next to the label of this drop down that says something like [add] or something like that. i want it to maybe bring up a new page (possibly a javascript box) and then let the user enter in the info that they need for the text box, and then the javascript would refresh the page, and php would see the new data on the refresh, add the new info to the database, and then that way when the drop down reloads, the new data will be in the drop down.

basically, i want to know how to populate drop downs on the fly.

any idea on how to do this? is this a common thing? i understand javascript will probably be necessary, but i was wondering if anyone had any advice.

thanks ahead of time.

[bpat1434]

I wouldn't use JavaScript. But that's me personally. I use dynamic drop-downs for photo insertion into the database. They select the category and event from drop-downs.

Here's how I'd do it (this is only for 1 drop-down):

<?php

$query = "SELECT * FROM `table` ORDER BY id DESC";
$result = mysql_query($query);
echo '<select name="something">';
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
    echo '<option value="'.$row['value'].'">'.$row['title'].'</option>';
}
echo '</select>';
echo '<a href="addnewitem.php?drop=1">[ Add new Item to this Drop-Down ]</a>';

?>

That will create a drop-down with a link. Then the next php page will automatically know what drop-down it's for (drop=1).

That's just my input for you.

~Brett