Hey everyone, I'm kinda new to this so excuse me if this is an unclear question.

I have two list boxes: Departments and Employees. When the user first goes to the page, I want them to have Departments(populated from my database), but no Employees yet. Once the user clicks on a Department, I want the Employees listbox to be populated with Employees from that Department.

I've heard that I can do an onclick or onchange event for this using a POST variable, but whenever I try it, it won't work properly. Can anyone help with this, or have any examples? Any help is appreciated.

you can't do in only with JS - first of all you have to store your info in db or in a simple file (to set a accordance betweent department and employees). and second - you have to use a script that will "onclick" get the department name and then get all employees and form a dynamic listbox...

I would do this with php and mysql looping through the results on each pass adding an option to the list box.

Had to do this a while back and solved it with perl and HTML, but you need to learn a little Perl and I am sure you are not too keen on that. As far as I know this is not possible with pure HTML.

Let me get more specific on my method...

PHP Code:

// Lets assume that the info has already been queried from the db in
// the variable $employees
<?php

echo '<select name="employees">';
while($res = $employees) {
  echo '<option value="'.$res['id'].'">'.$res['name'].''
}
echo '</select>';

?>

Thats a very rough idea of how to do it. There are several methods but this will work.

Thanks for all the replys.

In my Employees database, I have the fields 'Name', 'Department', etc. So what I want to do is when the user selects a department, the employee listbox is populated with employee 'Name's that have that department in their rows. I guess what I'm not getting is how to do an "onclick" or "onchange" with the department listbox that will save the user's choice in order for me to reference it when I populate the employee listbox. And do I have to refresh the page for this?

Once again thanks for all the help

Do I have to do this with JavaScript, to save the department choice in order to reference it? If so what do I do for the "onclick" event, and how should the employee list reference it?

Try using the "onselect=doSomething". This works with all input and textarea elements

Yes, the onselect will work fine. But, what should I put as the function or whatever that it's gonna call. For example I've been trying to write a function that get called "onselect" and stores the department value, and then re-populates the employee listbox. The only problem is it's not working, haha.

I really don´t think this is possible with pure HTML, what are you using?
I did this with perl.
The file prints out a HTML page with the first select box populated from the database, which is done by perl and stored in a hash. I also have a hidden param on the page, which is set to whatever, when the form is submitted. When it is submitted, the same file is called again but now the hidden param value has changed and it goes into an if loop {if (param('cmd') == 'whatever') print the next page} it now has the value from the first select box stored and perl uses this to pull the data out of the database, stores it in a hash and populates the second selectbox.
I hope this helps, if you need a little code, I can try to put something together tomorrow, I have to go home now and relax.
Cheers.

I'm using PHP. Sorry, I should have said that from the beginning. I appreciate the help though.

Nevermind I got it, thanks for the help!