two drop down menu in a php form

chinto09

i am new to php and hope u ppl will help me to solve this.

i am working on a song website ,where there are two drop down menu in a search form.
1-Category 2- Singer Name

when a User select a category their relevant singers are displayed in the very next drop down menu which is named as singer.

Can any body tell me how i can achieve this.

stolzyboy

Either way you do it, it's the same, but visually, there are differences.

If you don't want to have the page reload, you'd need to use AJAX, if you don't care about reload, you wouldn't need AJAX.

I'm not sure if you are going to have this hardcoded or DB driven or what, but essentially, you can have the form submitted when the first dropdown is change, so you have it submit onchange.

Then you check the value that was submitted and depending on how you will be doing it, you just write out the <option>'s for that category.

Get started with some code and we can guide you where you have problems.

hth,
stolzyboy

blackhorse

I use the same php solution as stolzboy, let it reload.

If you don't want reload and ajax is too much. There are some simple javascript solution available.

Search for javascript "chained menu" or something like that. You can then program your php/database data into these javascript codes.

chinto09

Thanx

chinto09

Thanx stolzboy & blackhorse
but i dont't want to use Ajax or javascript chained menu
Here is some of the code

$thisfile=$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
$message = <<< form
<form method="post" action="$thisfile">
Select Catagory <select name="category">
<option>Arabic Singers</option>
<option>Punjabi singers</option>
<option>Rock Singer</option>
<option>Indian Singers</option>
</select>

//Singers will be select when a relevant cateageory is selected form 1st select

Singer <select name="singer">
</select>

<input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit">
</form>
form;

Now the problem is how i can populate list of singers in second drop down menu according to their category.

stolzyboy

easy...

have another <select> block and populate it...

if () //form is submitted and a category has been selected
{
//do your selections for your singers
}

chinto09

Done it 🙂

thank u

jonquinn

Hello. I have almost the same circumstances as chinto. In my case though I have a wordpress blog as a small business directory with a drop down category as the second category. It looks like this

1st drop down - Select a County
2nd drop down - Select a Product Category

Now in my case I want to create the first dropdown as a form with static options.
For the second dropdown I want to use the category widget that calls all the categories from the sql database.

Basically I need use the first menu to add a category to the second menus output so that it will only display posts related to county + product.

I hope that makes sense. I have been searching all over for a solution and have not been able to code this myself. I will be very grateful to any help that can be offered.
thanks,
Jonathan

benracer

i would have two forms with one dropdown inside. In the first one hardcode the values/data have an onchange submit event in the select. With the second run an if statement to see if it contains a value, if it does then run an select query with an while loop to insert thr <options>. If there is no value add an option tag with a comment like "Please select a mail catogry"

noelgreen

Oh my goodness... I signed up on this forum to ask this VERY QUESTION!!! 😃

Here's my question... or "version thereof".
I have a search on my page that contains 3 elements...

1) the text input
2) a dropdown box of categories
3) a dropdown box of tags

I need someone to be able to type something in the field, select a category, and select a tag then press "search" and see only the results that fit those items.

The input field works fine.
The input field with the categories dropdown works fine.
If I remove the categories dropdown, the input field with the tags dropdown works fine.

What doesn't work is all three together... basically the 2 dropdown boxes are conflicting, or WP doesn't know what to do with them.

So, my question is, how can I use 2 dropdown boxes in a search query?

Here's the site... you can see what I'm trying to do.
It ALMOST works... but doesn't quite work yet... any help would be so appreciated!

http://www.couponfridge.com/2.0/

jonquinn, did you figure this out yet?

stolzyboy

As long as they are named different, you can use them as different variables in the PHP portion.

name=categories will be $POST['categories']
name=tabs will be $POST['tag']

This seems trivial to me, so don't be offended if I'm stating the obvious as I'm not fully sure what's now "working".

What does your query look like?

And remember to always "clean" your $_POST variables before using them in an SQL query to prevent SQL injection.

noelgreen

As simple as it seems to you, I have no idea what you're saying. 🙂

Here's the code I have for the drop down boxes.

<form method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/">
Keyword: <input type="text" value="<?php the_search_query(); ?>" name="s" id="s" />
City: <?php wp_dropdown_categories('orderby=name'); ?>
Category:<?php wp_tag_cloud('number=0&format=list&orderby=name'); ?>
<input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
</form>

And here's what my search string looks like if I search for "quizno" in Dallas, TX, under dining.:

http://www.couponfridge.com/2.0/?s=quizno&cat=6&tags=7

The thing is it brings up the Quizno's coupon... but if I change the "dining" category to "auto", it still brings it up. In other words it's not filtering based on tags... only categories.

So, what I think you're saying is more of a "hard code" way of making the search function. That would work with the Tags section (auto, dining, etc...) but not with the cities section as administrators of the site are able to enter in their own cities.

I'm wondering if I need to figure out a way to add a 2nd "categories" section to WordPress... so that it searches "primary" categories and "secondary" categories.

Or am I still missing how simple this is? 🙂

Thanks for the help so far!

jonquinn

Hey Noel. No I haven't had any luck so far. I am going to have to find someone locally to do it for me. I don't understand the syntax and commands enough.

Good luck and please let me know if you figure it out.

noelgreen

I'm actually going to go about it a different way...

I will post on here if I ever do figure it out... there's a lot of people wanting this feature, so I won't be surprised if there's a plug-in for it one day soon.

Thanks for letting me know how your progress is going!
If you figure it out, please let me know!

Thanks!

jonquinn

Were you ever able to bring up posts with the qualification that they are in both categories?

stolzyboy

noel,
Is it searching a DB or what is it searching that it's not limiting?

If it's a DB, can I see your query?