Question

I’m not sure that I am asking this question properly… I assumed that I would’ve already located various resources/examples out there. I work in PHP but think this is a jQuery or Ajax type of solution.

1) I want to present a page that has a dropdown selection of states at the top and also has links to other category pages below the drop down on the same page.

2) When a state is selected (and while on the same page) the selected value is passed directly to those links.

so if I choose “FL” then $state then populates with FL in the links.

I know I’ve seen this type of functionality in action somewhere, but seem to be drawing a blank finding examples.

Answer 1

Assuming that I understand your question, and you want to append the selected state code to the link URLs as a querystring parameter, you could do it like this:

// add a handler to the select element
$('#state').change(function() {
    // get the state code
    var stateCode = $(this).val();
    if (stateCode) {
        // attach it to each link
        $('a.categorylink').each(function() {
            var href = $(this).attr('href')
                // cut off any existing querystring
                .split('?')[0];
            // add a new querystring
            href += '?state=' + stateCode;    
            // set the revised url
            $(this).attr('href', href)
        });
    }
});

This assumes that you don’t have any other querystring parameters in these links. You can see a working version here: http://jsfiddle.net/nrabinowitz/PbmL9/