Populating List Boxes

Question

Azadi – Thanks for your HELP on my last problem.
– This is the Old Dog Playing a Young persons game! And
loving It! Using CF8 and MySQL 5
New?? List Boxes, or drop-down Combo list Boxes, could you or
someone direct me in the proper direction for information on how to
Populate a list box or combo box based on the input of the previous
list box?? Example Enter From Selection - Southern Gulf Coastal
States - All the State in the Southern Gulf Coast would populate
the next combo box, and select a State and all the Coastal Cities
would be of choice and next after cities is the Zip.
I know how to do it in MS Access not sure the best way to
attack this in cf8.
Thanks

Answer 1

There are many ways to do this:
1. By submitting your data to cf server first and query only
according to user selection then populate the target fields
according to query.
2. By querying all data and use javascript
variables/arrays/structures to populate your combo box everytime
user change the selected item.
3. By incorporating Ajax to your CF application.
The first one is the easiest one. But everytime you make
changes to your selection, your app submits to cf server which is
kind of slow 'cause you have to submit everytime selection changes.
The second one is by querying all the data, which is slow at
first 'coz even the unnecessary data are returned. That is, I don't
think the user would try to select all the selections one by one,
but rather maybe just select one item. Though, it will be faster
already when the user selects another item. This way, your form
doesn't have to be re-submitted 'coz you let a javascript
variable/arrays/structures store the data at first query.
The third one(kind of a mix of both 1 and 2), which is the
most efficient way among the three to achieve your goal, needs
learning Ajax which is going to take a few of your time. But if you
know it already, you can let it work well with CF8.
Anyway, a simple sample code for the first method is
attached: