Question

I need help in this and am very confusing thinking how to do this.

I have a form, an update/edit form, inside it I have a multiple selected listbox.

In my database records:

ID Items
1  Apple
2  Banana
3  Orange
4  Pear
5  Starfruit

And whenever the user clicks on edit which brings them to this form where I have made the listbox highlighted according to their previous saved data.

When the user clicks update, the listbox in the update form will look like this:

<option selected>Apple</option> <-- highlighted
<option>Banana</option>
<option selected>Orange</option> <-- highlighted
<option>Pear</option>
<option selected>Starfruit</option> <-- highlighted

This is what the user will see according to their 1st chosen items which was saved previously.

Currently I’m doing hard coding it:

<?php
$select=mysql_query("select * from products_list where id='$id' "); 
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($select)){

$product_category = explode("\n", $row['category']);
$i=0;

    echo '<select name="product_category[]" id="category" size="9" multiple="multiple"><option value="Black" ';
if ($product_category[$i] == "Black" ){ echo 'selected="selected"'; $i++; }
echo '>Black</option><option value="White" ';
if ($product_category[$i] == "White" ){ echo 'selected="selected"'; $i++; }
echo '>Black</option><option value="Blue" ';
if ($product_category[$i] == "Blue" ){ echo 'selected="selected"'; $i++; }
echo '>Black</option>';
}
?>

And so on so forth. I only list a few. So I would like to ask is there a way that I can do this, if my listbox options are not hard coded?

Hope you guys understand. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I’m sorry if i misunderstood you and your code but I think this is what you want to do:

<?php
$select=mysql_query("select * from products_list where id='$id' ");

// Insert the categories in an array in order
$categories = array('Black', 'White', 'Blue', ...);

while($row=mysql_fetch_array($select))
{
    $product_category = explode("\n", $row['category']);

    echo '<select name="product_category[]" id="category" size="9" multiple="multiple">';

    foreach($product_category as $i=>$value)
    {
        echo '<option value="'.$categories[$i].'"';

        if($value == $categories[$i])
        {
            echo ' selected="selected"';
        }

        echo '>'.$categories[$i].'</option>';
    }

    echo '</select>';
}