Question

Once again I am ‘dabbling’ in the dark art of javascript and jQuery without much of a clue as to what I’m actually doing. All I know is that I managed to get my code to function by cribbing bits of other code and modifying it a bit, and after a lot of cursing, it worked…. in a fashion.

Below is a piece of my code, which correctly builds and displays a dynamic selectbox with values returned from a mysql query. When the user selects one of the items from the list, the code successfully runs a function which displays a map associated with that item.

What I ACTUALLY need it to do is also run the code to display the map for the default/top item returned by the query first, and THEN whenever a new item is selected it should run the function to display the newly selected map.

I hope the explanation has been clear enough, but feel free to chastise me if not.

Many thanks,

Rob.

 $(document).ready(function() {
$('#selecthere').load('/temp/php_script.php?r='+ random, function () 
 { //callback
$('select', this).change(function () { //catch onchange event of select
//call your function here, pass the selected value
initialize($(this).val());
});
});
});

Answer 1

(Edited in light of comments below.)

If I understand, initialize(val) is the function that draws the map associated with val, and you want to run it when the page loads with val being whatever is in the select box by default. To do this, you could just add the function call in your ready function as such:

$(document).ready(function(){
    var random = Math.random();
    // load contents of php script into #selecthere element
    $('#selecthere').load('/temp/php_script.php?r='+ random, function (){ 
       // the contents of the php script are now loaded
       // go ahead and call initialize() on the value that is selected by default
       initialize($('select[name=title]').val());
       // attach a function to fire when select element is changed
       $('select[name=title]').change(function () { 
           // here 'this' refers to the select element
           // call initialize() with the value of select element
           initialize($(this).val());
       });
    });
});

Hope I understood.