How to shorten a 3rd dropdown list in casacade dropdowns

[RJ]

I need some help with design and functionaility on this form, unfortunately,
our company is not going into the direction of using sql, webservice and so
forth...when that time comes, this form will work beautifully but I have to
do it the hard way for now to keep them happy. Now I am flawed at this and
need some help on trying to make this work as I do not have a lot of resource
such as VB. I would like to use a cascade dropdowns...which i have done,
works fine however that 3rd dropdown can be so lengthy, it would be nice to
have a text box to type in the item to help them narrow down the 3rd dropdown
list and let them choose from there.. what can I do to make that better?
Please help and thank you for your time.

 

[Ed Thurber]

RJ:

a couple of questions:

1) by lengthy, do you mean that it will have a lot of entries or that the
individual entries are long (verbose).
2) what do you envision them entering into the textbox? some sort of
wildcard? or something else?

Ed

 

[RJ]

There are entries over a thousand to choose from. It would be nice to do
something like you mentioned using wildcard. the first 2 dropdowns are using
forms data instead of flatsource now so i am hoping this will reduce some
latency as I know this would happen. thank you.

 

[Ed Thurber]

have you tried simply adding the testbox field to the filter on the third
dropdown?

If you are using IP functionality, simply add both conditions to the Entries
field
(WHERE field1 = dropdown1 and field 2=dropdown2 and field3 contains textbox)

if you are using code to populate the third box add the additional filter to
the select statement
you should have a line that looks something like this:
XPathNodeIterator newItems =
DataSources["ActiveProjectsXML"].CreateNavigator().Select("//*[local-name()
= 'Active_Project'][@Development_Group ='" + _DevGrp + "'][@Project_Number =
'" + e.Site.InnerXml + "']");

This code is from an old project so the names are meaningless but you shold
have a line that looks similar. i think you can just add
"[contains(<fieldtosearch>,<string to find>]" at the end of the statement.



Ed

 

[RJ]

What is the triggering mechanism to help filter the 3rd drop down list, (like
auto complete) It would refresh everytime you add 3 different letters.
follow me?

have you tried simply adding the testbox field to the filter on the third
dropdown?

If you are using IP functionality, simply add both conditions to the Entries
field
(WHERE field1 = dropdown1 and field 2=dropdown2 and field3 contains textbox)

if you are using code to populate the third box add the additional filter to
the select statement
you should have a line that looks something like this:
XPathNodeIterator newItems =
DataSources["ActiveProjectsXML"].CreateNavigator().Select("//*[local-name()
= 'Active_Project'][@Development_Group ='" + _DevGrp + "'][@Project_Number =
'" + e.Site.InnerXml + "']");

This code is from an old project so the names are meaningless but you shold
have a line that looks similar. i think you can just add
"[contains(<fieldtosearch>,<string to find>]" at the end of the statement.



Ed

There are entries over a thousand to choose from. It would be nice to do
something like you mentioned using wildcard. the first 2 dropdowns are
using
forms data instead of flatsource now so i am hoping this will reduce some
latency as I know this would happen. thank you.