dynamic menu - per keystroke

[jjm106]

Hello,

I've been searching thru the forums for anything on dynamic menu building, but am not quite hitting what I'm looking for.

I'm trying to build a dynamic drop down menu from a table in MySQL but was wondering if it is possible to incrementally display the result SELECT OPTIONs with each keystroke.

For example if the list is U.S. states, as soon as I hit 'm', I would see Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, etc.... but if I typed far enough like 'min' then Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan would drop off the list.

...or if the list didn't diminish in size, the options would at least jump down to Minnesota.

Or something like that. I'm dealing with an 800+ option list of Job Titles in which a user has to choose 1. I'm trying to make the textbox entry more search-like, rather than drill-down-like.

Any suggestions? :queasy:

thanks,
JM

[ixalmida]

I think you need to look into newer client technologies. A typical HTML drop-down box it will behave as you describe, but I've also seen text-boxes behave that way as well (drop-downs with suggested auto-completes). I'm not sure what the client technology is, but I've noticed that Amazon uses it. I suspect there's some JDBC involved.

[johanafm]

Various javascript frameworks, such as YUI, have support for it. However, if this is all you need, it should take about the same time to javascript it yourself as it would learning a new api. On the other hand, generally the more familiar you get with an api, the quicker it becomes learning how to do new things within that framework.

[Weedpacket]

You might want to keep in mind the sort of demand you could end up making on your server: if you're initiating a new request/response on every keystroke that could end up being a lot of requests and responses.

You might actually get better throughput just loading the entire list into an array in an external .js file (so that the browser can cache it) and then do all the dynamic stuff in JavaScript on the client. With suitable coding around the textbox's keystroke handler (if the array is not defined then don't try to search it and just behave like an ordinary textbox, that sort of thing) you'd probably be taking a big load off everyone's connections.

800+ records might sound like a lot for one file in one array, but there are 26 letters in the English alphabet and even in the unlikely case that any one of those letters is equally likely to be the first one typed, that's still more than thirty possible matches for the first keystroke on average (also very unlikely - how many job titles would start with 't'?).

[johanafm]

Most definitely unless there's too much data to send needlessly. But then you'd instead put some kind of restriction on how/when requests are sent. E.g. 0.5 seconds after a keyup, cancel timer on keydown.