Question

I’m creating a webform that has combos containing 100 values or so. The values are the same.

The form may have several records. So if there are 100 records there are 10,000 lines which seems pretty wrong from a “download” point of view.

The thing is: I want to keep that combo dynamic to keep the id from the database.

So I came up to the following:

  .....
 <script>
      stupidCombo = "<option>a"+
                    "<option>b"+
                    ...
                    "<option>99zzz"+
                    "</select>";
 </script>
 ..... form here
 .... for each item in huge list do paint <table><tr> etc. etc 

 <td>
 <select name="comb-<%=id%>">
      <option selected><%=obj.val%>
      <script>document.write(stupidCombo);</script>
 </td>
... close form, table, html etc. 

I have rendered it and “look” fine. The page has decreased from 50k lines to 5k and the select is created by the javascript on the client side.

My question is…..

Is this ok?

Is there any risk involved?

I borrow this Idea after understanding who most of the javascript frameworks work, but most of them work on a <div> element rather that just to the document it self.

I’m targeting IE6 and this is a quick fix that has to be on production tomorrow morning ( so I don’t want to spend too much time on this ) but I don’t want to have 50,000 lines written for each request if I can help it.

Thanks

Answer 1

HTML produced by document.write works in same way as normal one, so there is no any technical problems with your solution. ( of course, such solution works only if javascript enabled )

By the way, for the lists with big count of options, you can look at “suggest box” component, which can replace native selectbox.