Dynamic population of a form using Struts

Question

Right now I have a combo box and a textbox. My combo box is populated by:
<html:select property="departmentName" onchange="changeDescription()">
  <html:options collection="departmentList" property="name" labelProperty="name"/>
</html:select>My textbox is declared as:
<html:text property="description"/>Ok so my problem now is coding that changeDescription() javascript method so that whenever a change in the combo box's selection is made, the textbox will be populated by another property "description". I can easily make the textbox populate with the same property "name" by using this:
function changeDescription() {
  document.forms[0].description.value = document.forms[0].departmentName.value;
}but how do I do it for another property?
I would greatly appreciate any help! Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm a bit confused by the question. Are you saying that you want the textbox to automatically update it's value everytime the combo box's currently selected item is changed. And you want the value assigned to the textbox to come from some place other than the value of the currently selected combobox item. Where should the value for the textbox come from? Looking at this it seems like you may want a simple map data structure that maps each combo box element to a description string. When the combo box is modified you should grab the currently selected element and lookup the description for that element in the map data structure and then set the textbox to the looked-up description. I may be missing something here..