retrieval of choice items from a string URL

phpcare

I have seen this many places and wonder how they do it. For instance,

The 'vehicle' entered our campus.

Here, when the user clicks the url 'vehicle', a small popup shows with choices car, truck, suv. Sometimes, the administrator can add a choice on the fly such as train or plane. How is this done in PHP or any language. Remember, a user is not shown a new screen. If possible, show me the code.

Thanks

phpcare.

jkurrle

Well, off the top of my head I can think of a few ideas. First, they could be using a simple HTML <a href="mypage.html" target="_blank"> series of tags. There also is a "window.open" command in javascript. A quick reference can be found at http://www.javascript-coder.com/window-popup/javascript-window-open.phtml .

Hope this helps.

obsidian

jkurrle wrote:
Well, off the top of my head I can think of a few ideas. First, they could be using a simple HTML <a href="mypage.html" target="_blank"> series of tags. There also is a "window.open" command in javascript. A quick reference can be found at http://www.javascript-coder.com/window-popup/javascript-window-open.phtml .

Hope this helps.

he stated that the user is not shown a new screen. this makes me think that he's talking about using a little javascript function to show/hide options on the fly.

basically, your best bet here is to already have your options written out, but just hide them using CSS (something like "display: none;" usually does nicely). then, when a user clicks a certain trigger, you change the display value of that object to make it appear.

if you're looking at having dynamic content in boxes like that, you'll want to read up on using AJAX to run queries or whatever "behind-the-scenes" so that you can display the results within that container.

phpcare

Yes. In other words it is like this.

A 'vehicle' entered my shop.

when the user clicks vehicle, a small popup shows with options like this

car
bus
van
suv
+more

This popup just overlays the word 'vehicle'.

obsidian

phpcare wrote:
Yes. In other words it is like this.

A 'vehicle' entered my shop.

when the user clicks vehicle, a small popup shows with options like this
 car
 bus
A van entered my shop.
suv
+add

yes, but i suppose where our question is is this: does that popup appear WITHIN the current window, or are you wanting a new window to popup with the options in it?

phpcare

I am not sure the issues with it. It should behave much like a choice option whether a new pop window is poped out or within.