[RESOLVED] Setting Default Vallue for MySQL Populated Dropdown Menu?

jpoladsky

I am creating a form for adding a property listing to the database for a real estate website. The company I am making this site for is based in Colorado, so the majority of all their listings are in Colorado.

I have a drop down menu to select the state where the property is located. The state list is generated from a table that gives every state an id and has its full name and abbreviation.

To make it simpler on the people updating the site and adding listings I would like it to have CO(with the state_id of 6) as the default selected value. I can't think of a way to do this, since the list is generated from the table.
Thanks!

dagon

within the loop for the dropdown

if($id==6) echo' SELECTED';

NogDog

Or if you need to be XHTML-compliant, use selected="selected". 😉

jpoladsky

Uhmm haha I don't know where to add it to my code :o. Here is the code I am using to generate the drop down menu.

$query="SELECT state_id, state_abbr FROM state";
$result = mysqli_query ($dbc, $query);
echo '<select name="state_id" value="" size="1">'; 
while ( $blah = mysqli_fetch_array($result, MYSQLI_ASSOC)) {
echo '<option value='. $blah[state_id] .'>' . $blah[state_abbr] . '</option>';
}
echo '</select>';

thanks

bradgrafelman

So before that closing '>' for the <option> tag, either break out of the echo and do an if() statement (as suggested above), or use an in-line ternary statement:

($blah['state_id'] == 6 ? 'selected="selected"' : '')

NogDog

I sometimes like to use [man]printf/man (or sprintf()) for something like that, just to keep it clear what the heck is going on in the source code:

echo '<select name="state_id" value="" size="1">';
while ( $blah = mysqli_fetch_array($result, MYSQLI_ASSOC)) {
   printf(
      "<option value='%d'%s>%s</option>\n",
      $blah['state_id'],
      ($blah['state_id'] == 6) ? ' selected="selected"' : '',
      $blah['state_abbr']
   );
}

PS: You really should quote your associative array indexes. See Why Is $foo[bar] Wrong? for why.

jpoladsky

never mind

jpoladsky

NogDog;10878844 wrote:
I sometimes like to use [man]printf/man (or sprintf()) for something like that, just to keep it clear what the heck is going on in the source code:
echo '<select name="state_id" value="" size="1">';
while ( $blah = mysqli_fetch_array($result, MYSQLI_ASSOC)) {
   printf(
      "<option value='%d'%s>%s</option>\n",
      $blah['state_id'],
      ($blah['state_id'] == 6) ? ' selected="selected"' : '',
      $blah['state_abbr']
   );
}
PS: You really should quote your associative array indexes. See Why Is $foo[bar] Wrong? for why.

Thank you!