Question

Basically I have a HTML option box written like so:

<span>Design </span><select name="style">
    <option value="blueprint"> Blueprint</option>
    <option value="bubbles">Bubbly Bubbles</option
    <option value="carpet">Colourful Carpet</option>
    <option value="circles">Creative Circles</option>
    <option value="dots">Default Dots</option>
    <option value="hexagons">Honeycomb Hexagons</option>
    <option value="linen">Lovely Linen</option>
    <option value="loops">Loopy Loops</option>
    <option value="noise">Niché Noise</option>
    <option value="wiggles">Wiggly Wiggles</option>
    <option value="wood">Wunder Wood</option>
</select> 

The value of whichever is selected is inputted into a database using PHP and used to determine the style of the webpage. Obviously, however, whenever a user enters the settings panel in the backend of this, the option at the top of the list is show, I know I can use ‘selected’ to state which one is shown at the top however the one I want at the top needs to be the same as the one they selected and saved last time, in order to not cause confusion. How would I go about giving the ‘selected’ tag to the option that was selected and saved previously (the one that is in the database)?

Answer 1

You could read the settings with php on the same script that generates the form, and then iterate over each option. If the value is the same as the one on the database, echo() a selected='true' attribute to the element.

The other method I would search would be with javascript. You could Ajax the saved value in the database and then change the selected attribute for the element that matches.

I couldn’t really post code as I don’t know it right now, but I’m pretty sure with those tips you could get going..