Question

What I want to do is make a dropdownlist choices change depending on other dropdownlists on the page. What I did is write all the possibilities in hidden textboxes. This works, but when there are a lot of choices, the page is slow.

Is there a better way to do this?

Thank you for your time

Answer 1

The best way to do this is with AJAX. In summary you will need to:

1. write a server side script (ashx probably) that returns the relevant results for a drop down dependent on some variable
2. use JavaScript (or a library like jQuery) to do the AJAX call to the ashx page. This call will need to pass the defining variable to the server via POST or GET.
3. attach this AJAX call to the change event of the select boxes so that when they are changed the other ones can be updated
4. when the AJAX call is completed you will need a JavaScript function that sorts out the returned data. This data could be simple HTML that is added to the page or a more complex JSON object that needs to be formatted. The choice is yours. But this formatting and response needs to be written in JavaScript.