Question

How would I go about creating the following:

I am looking to create a dropdown menu full of form input types but when one is selected I would like it to create the respective html for the input and save it to the database. I will be using codeigniter.

Example:

If I select Text Area from the dropdown menu it will then create <textarea></textarea> so then I could escape it and save it to the database.

I have come up with the following code so far

        if (isset($_REQUEST['general_options'])) 
        {

            $optionName  = $_REQUEST['general_options'];

            $optionValue = strtolower(str_replace(" ", "", $_REQUEST['general_options']));


            //$this->load->view( $page, $data, FALSE);
            echo form_label($optionName, $optionValue);
            echo form_input($optionValue, '', '');
        }`

`

Answer 1

Unless your intent on reloading the page every time you make a select choice, your best bet is to incorporate something like jQuery which is a javascript library.

Then with that you can do something like

<select id="mySelect">
   <option value="none" selected="selected">---Select---</option>
   <option value="textarea">Textarea</option>
</select>

<div id="appendElem"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
   $('#mySelect').change(function()
   {
      if($(this+' option:selected').val() == "textarea")
      {
          $('#appendElem').html('<textarea>Some Text...</textarea>');
      }
   })
</script>

A note worth mentioning is just cause Codeigniter has a form helper class, and makes it sound through its docs that its the only way to build a form on your page. Standard HTML forms work just as well in your views.