Dynamic Drop Down, I'am a complete Ajax newbie, need help urgently please

Hi all,

I'm busy with a website for a South African tourism company,

they want the bookings system to be very user-friendly,

so I made a few dropdowns in PHP, but now comes the hard

part for me, I have to create a onchange event and use Ajax

to send the server request and database query, and retrieve

the content and then use it in the next drop down... 

So basically it's a country dropdown, and after that follows the

province/state dropdown and it's content should be relative to that

of the country, and then again for the towns... There isn't any code

that I think will be of use, only PHP echoes for a HTML form

and select boxes, if you need anything else I'll be happy

to post it..

Can you also please explain the Ajax I need in this situation, because

I really want to know how Ajax works for any future projects

requiring it 

Thanks, I really appreciate it!

Chaos...

Have you tried googling ajax tutorials or something? I'm not sure we really need to write another one just for you.

Thanks for the reply, yes I also looked at Ajax in books like Head First Javascript and Javascript Bible, but most of them only return xml documents. I think what I need to do is make the first dropdown available, and when someone chooses an option I somehow have to use Ajax to add something like country=southafrica to the url, is that possible? Also, can I use Ajax to add the second and third dropdowns only when the previous dropdown changes? Thanks! Chaos

hmm w3schools.com or tizag.com might have some tutorials.

Hi, thanks, I went through that tutorials after you sent your message, but now I just want to know if this will be possible: the php script already echoes the select element and query the database, but what I need to know is how do I send the variables using ajax to that php page and can I return the entire select with it's values and insert it into the page using Ajax? Thanks!

Are you using any JS library like jQuery or YUI? If you don't I would highly recommend it especially jQuery, it has tons of plugins it's quite possible they have a plugin that does just that for you where you would pass the three id's (of your select) in sequence.

et voila: http://remysharp.com/2007/09/18/auto-populate-multiple-select-boxes/

Told you someone already wrote it.

Thanks for your reply... Is jQuery easy to use? Can you please give me an example on how to implement a jQuery plugin?