How to retain drop down values after submit ?

[jacksantho]

i have a little form with a select list, and i am submitting the form every time i select an item. the problem is that, after selecting a value and submitting the form, the selected item doesn't remain selected. Is there any method to keep the selected item selected in the list, after the form submit?

<form name="order_of_products_by_values" id="order_of_products_by_values" method="post" action="">
<select id="order_of_products_by_values" name="order_of_products_by_values" onChange="this.form.submit();">
<option value=1 >Pret crescator</option>
<option value=2 >Pret descrescator</option>
<option value=3 >Test</option>
<option value=4 >Test</option>
</select>
</form>

please help me out

[cereal]

So, if you write $_POST['order_of_products_by_values'] you don't get anything? if you select Pret crescator you should get 1.

Ops, I see that form and select are using the same id and name. Each element can use only a unique id per page, each form element can share the same name only if they are grouping, like radio buttons, so change the name and the id of your form.

[almostbob]

wrapping the code in [code=language] bla bla bla [/code] tags to enable highlighting,
and fixed a few html errors, red is not a 'good' color for code, values must be quoted

<form name="order_of_products_by_values" id="order_of_products_by_values" method="post" action="">
<select id="order_of_products_by_values" name="order_of_products_by_values" onChange="this.form.submit();"> 
<option value=1 >Pret crescator</option>
<option value=2 >Pret descrescator</option>
<option value=3 >Test</option>
<option value=4 >Test</option>
</select>
</form>

becomes

<form name="order_of_products_by_values" id="order_of_products_by_values" method="post" action="<?php echo $_server['php_self']; ?>">
<select id="order_of_products_by_values1" name="order_of_products_by_values1" onChange="this.form.submit();"> 
<option value='1' <?php if($_POST['order_of_products_by_values1']=='1') echo 'selected="selected"';?> >Pret crescator</option>
<option value='2' <?php if($_POST['order_of_products_by_values1']=='2') echo 'selected="selected"';?>>Pret descrescator</option>
<option value='3' <?php if($_POST['order_of_products_by_values1']=='3') echo 'selected="selected"';?>>Test</option>
<option value='4' <?php if($_POST['order_of_products_by_values1']=='4') echo 'selected="selected"';?>>Test</option>
</select>
</form>

not clean code but effective,
and didnt bother to code out possible errors at the initial form state where no value has been submitted
eg: <option value='3' <?php if($_post) {if($_POST['order_of_products_by_values1']=='3') echo 'selected="selected"';} ?> >Test</option> leaving you something to do :)

[jacksantho]

Hi , this is the my exact code:

I passing in while loop:

print "<select name=\"name\">";
print "<option value=''>Select your manager</option>";
while($row2=mysql_fetch_assoc($result1))
{
    
	print "<option value=".$row2['mid'].">".$row2['mngname']."</option>";
}
print "</select>";

hi please give the solutions for this code..what posted now ? thanks

[almostbob]

echo '<select name="name"><option value="">Select your manager</option>';
while($row2=mysql_fetch_assoc($result1)) {
 echo '<option value="'.$row2['mid'].'"'; //line broken in the middle of the option declaration
 if($row2['mid']= $_POST['name']) echo 'selected="selected"'; //select the appropriate value only
 echo '>'.$row2['mngname'].'</option>'; }//option declaration completed
echo "</select>";

echo is infinitessimally faster than print :)

[jacksantho]

hi, thanks a lot .Its working prefectly.thanks for your code . For me its very difficult to understand single quotes concatenation...

[madCoder]

(The previous two posts came in while I was editing this, but maybe it will still be useful to you.)

@jacksantho,

Your code is looking better but you haven't integrated what @almostbob demonstrated. You must echo out some html, selected="selected" for the option that is selected for the entry. What does $result1 contain? For the moment I'll assume it contains a list of all the managers that meet some criteria.

So if these managers are being associated to an employee and we assume that $employee_managers contains an array of this employee's manager IDs:

/**
 *  @param mixed $needle - Item we are searching for
 *  @param array $haystack - values to search through
 */
function isSelected($needle, $haystack) {
  return in_array(trim($needle),$haystack);
}

print "<select name=\"name\" multiple=\"multiple\">";
print "<option value=''>Select your manager</option>";
while($row2=mysql_fetch_assoc($result1))
{
 
	print "<option value=".$row2['mid']." ".(isSelected($row2['mid'], $employee_managers) ? 'selected="SELECTED"' : '').">".$row2['mngname']."</option>";
}
print "</select>";

[almostbob]

they call it concatenation,,
ever tried to get a cat to do something it didnt already want to ?? same thing :P