Tips on populating a dropdown from another dropdown

[cb2004]

Can anybody offer up any tips for this? Basically on a contact form there are certain services, and certain staff members are assigned to those services. When a service is selected in a dropdown, I only want the staff members assigned to that service to be displayed in another dropdown. Guessing it is venturing into Ajax which I have not done with ProcessWire yet.

Cheers.

[cb2004]

So in my form I am selecting the services:

foreach ($pages->get(1040)->children as $child) {
	$service .= '<option value="' . $child->id . '">' . $child->title . '</option>';
}

This is then returning a nice set of options to interrogate from ID:

<select name="service" id="service">
	<option value="1041">Service 1</option>
	<option value="1042">Service 2</option>
</select>

So I am thinking next step is to put a PHP file on the server which would do a $pages->find("template=service, page_staff=VALUE") using Ajax and return the results with the staff name?

[bernhard]

How many entries do you have for both fields? Maybe some jquery is easier than ajax..

[cb2004]

Yes I thought that as well. So I am giving each option in the staff dropdown classes:

<option value="Staff member" class="1041 1045 1046 1048">Staff member</option>

Then if the service dropdown selected is value="1041", only those staff members will be selected. Just got to work on the jQuery and then all done.

[tpr]

Classes starting with digits are invalid, better to use "id-1041" for example. But I would use data attributes instead (data-ids="1041 1046", etc).

[cb2004]

Yeah, I have been caught out with classes starting with digits a few times. I will look into adding a data tag as you suggest.

Cheers.

[adrian]

Admittedly I don't fully understand your needs, but PW has some inbuilt support for this if you are using Page fields. You can do something like this:

parent=page.service

for the page field's "define selector to find pages". This will create an ajaxified UI for field relations.

It may not work for what you need, but thought I'd mention it just in case.