Help! Random Var??

**chris_davidsonu** · 06-26-2005, 02:52 PM

I am having a bit of a problem, think my best bet is java (i think). I have a search box on my site which has an intial value set like so:

<input name="skey" type="text" value= "Magician" size="20" maxlength="64" onFocus="clearText(this)">

So this would search for magicians (obviously).

But I want to have the initial random 'value' so every time a user comes on the site they have a random serach they could perform, clown, singer etc.. for example
I have tried using php and a bit of java but nothing seems to work? Anybody know which direction I should be going to get this working?

**Phaedrus** · 06-26-2005, 05:25 PM

Create a JavaScript array containing all the possible random search words. Then you can write a little function to put in the <body> tag's "onload" event which sets the value of the box randomly to one of those words in the array.

**Christopher** · 06-26-2005, 07:10 PM

Something like this.

HTML Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xml:lang="en" lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title>Outershift - Administration</title>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

    <script type="text/javascript">
    var keywords = ["Magician", "Clown", "Singer", "Actor"];

    function setSearchKeyword(id)
    {
        var obj     = document.getElementById(id);
        var rand    = Math.round(Math.random() * (keywords.length - 1) );

        if(!obj)
            return false;

        obj.value = keywords[rand];
        return true;
    }
    </script>
</head>
<body onload="setSearchKeyword('skey')">

<form action="mysearch.php" method="get">
    Search: <input name="skey" id="skey" type="text" value="" size="20" maxlength="64" onfocus="clearText(this)">
</form>

</body>
</html>

**chris_davidsonu** · 06-27-2005, 08:45 PM

Hope I can one day repay the favour, worked perfect. You are a star