opening a form with a different option selected other than the default

[Jonathan LaRosa]

Anyone know how to do this with javascript? I'm trying to avoid
creating two different forms because then changes become that much
harder to manage. Thanks in advance . . .
~ Jon LaRosa
jlarosa at alumni dot brown dot edu

I would like to create 2 links to a form that do the following:

A) one link would open the form with one option of a drop down list
selected
B) the other link would open the same form with a different option of
a drop down list selected

for example, the links:
Click here to search our books
Click here to search our photos

Both links open a search form, library.html, but in one case "books"
is the automatically selected search type and in the other case
"photos" is automatically selected.

I.E. in the first case, we have: <select name="searchTyp e">
<option SELECTED>books</option>
<option>photo s</option>
</select>

and in the second we have: <select name="searchTyp e">
<option>books </option>
<option SELECTED>photos </option>
</select>

[Michael Winter]

On 7 Apr 2004 12:03:48 -0700, Jonathan LaRosa <jl*****@alumni .brown.edu>
wrote:

Anyone know how to do this with javascript? I'm trying to avoid
creating two different forms because then changes become that much
harder to manage. Thanks in advance . . .
~ Jon LaRosa
jlarosa at alumni dot brown dot edu

I would like to create 2 links to a form that do the following:

A) one link would open the form with one option of a drop down list
selected
B) the other link would open the same form with a different option of
a drop down list selected

[snip]

It would be best to use server-side support to dynamically write the
selected attribute to the appropriate option element. You could specify
the one to select through the search (query) part of the URI:

<a href="library.h tml?type=books" >Search our books</a>
<a href="library.h tml?type=photos ">Search our photos</a>

If server-side support is not available, you could add this below the form
on the library.html page:

var form = document.forms[ 'formName' ],
type = form.elements[ 'searchType' ];

if( -1 != location.search .indexOf( 'type=photos' )) {
type.selectedIn dex = 1;
type.options[ 1 ].defaultSelecte d = true;
else if( -1 != location.search .indexOf( 'type=books' )) {
type.selectedIn dex = 0;
type.options[ 0 ].defaultSelecte d = true;
}

Assuming the HTML you presented in your original post.

Hope that helps,
Mike

--
Michael Winter
M.******@blueyo nder.co.invalid (replace ".invalid" with ".uk" to reply)