Question

On my website, user’s are allowed to filter games by Genre. When a user chooses a genre from the select box and hits submit, the page uses GET to see what the filter was. Now the filter works fine, the problem is that the select box’s selection goes to the default one (Which says “All”.)

I want it so that after a user submits their filter request, the select box will keep that selection after the page reloads.

There’s only one way I could think of to do this but it would require adding in PHP into every option there is. Are there any simpler ways to go about doing this with PHP or jQuery?

Answer 1

Assuming you’re doing a full form submit the selected option is only going to be available to the server-side code, once it gets back to the client to use jQuery you won’t have that (unless you try to use cookies before the form submit, but bleh).

I’d use PHP in the option tag and echo selected="selected" if the option matches up with the selected option.

If you want to avoid a lot of duplicated code why not do something like this:

<select name="test">
<?php
$options = array(1 => 'Option 1', 2 => 'Option 2', 3 => 'Option 3');
foreach ($options as $key => $value) { 
   echo '<option value="' . $key . '"' . ($key == $_GET["test"] ? ' selected="selected"' : '') . '>' . $value . '</option>';
} ?>
</select>