Can anyone point me to a reference that I can use to populate the contents of an edit field or even a static text field based on a selection in a drop down menu? I have a list of codes people can choose from. Once they select the code and click the seach button, I want to display the explanatory text for them in a field on the same page.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi rwrona

Welcome to the City!:)
To gather the selected value from a select you need to access the options collection and find, from that, which the user selected. To do that us:
object.options[object.selectedIndex].value
you can use this in the onchange event-handler for the select thus:
<select onchange="myText.value = this.options[this.selectedIndex].value">
<option value="a">A</option>
<option value="b">B</option>
<option value="c">C</option>
<option value="d">D</option>
</select>
<input name="mytext" type="text" />

javascript???

then,,, or like this maybe ??? If you want help to appear on the same page as the form.

<form>


<select name="whatever" onChange="document.getElementById('message').innerHTML=this.value;">
<option value="0">pick one</option>
<option value="you selected do this">Do This</option>
<option value="you selected do that">Do That</option>
</select>

</form>

<div id="message">
da Message
</div>

Note my JavaScript is not good. Daides is a much better bet :D

Coldfusion If you want help to appear on the same page as the search results

If you want to submit the form info to a processing page then display the help message on that then you could use a switch.

Say the select box name was "whatever" as above, and the values of the options were a, b, c etc. Then on the processing page you could test the value passed and display the appropriate text.


<cfswitch expression="#whatever#">

<cfcase value="a"><p>You picked A</p></cfcase>

<cfcase value="b"><p>You picked B</p></cfcase>

<cfcase value="c"><p>You picked C</p></cfcase>

</cfswitch>

Note using CFSWICH/CFCASE is a better option than CFIF CFELSEIF and CFELSE as the switch jumps out of the loop imediately it finds a match (thus saving a few serverside milliseconds) whereas CFIF etc will test all IF IFELSE statements before it continues