?!!?!!? Help with a complex Drop Down, Please

[Sribeiro]

Hello All, I'm absolutely stunned by my clients request and require the assistance of more savvy developers on this.

My client wants a Search box that contains to fields - [1] Business [2] City.
When you click on the "Business" field a drop down menu appears with all the options available with check boxes, you then choose the business/es you are interested in. Then you move on to the cities and select the desired cities to search the selected business/es. When satisfied you hit enter and a complete list matching your Business/es and Cities selections appears in a formatted page.

Would anyone know of anything similar out there that I can learn from, or can someone give me a list/map of how I should get started and what to do?
ANY HELP, NO_MATTER HOW SMALL, IS VERY WELCOMED!

Here's a link of a moc-up I did to show what I'm talking about - http://www.marcusgroup.com/test/imag...hSelection.jpg

Thanks, so, so, so much in advance everyone.

[infinityspiral]

Are you familiar with jQuery? This seems like it would be a big help in this problem. You could put all your options in a div and then when the user clicks on the field you would call .toggle() the div. Check this out:
http://api.jquery.com/toggle/

or even this too to have animation:
http://api.jquery.com/slideToggle/

[Sribeiro]

Awesome, I know JQuery but didnt know about the toggles. Honestly my main concern is after you choose one element from each drop down, and you hit search, how to make it so a clean list of both elements comes up or loads a new page with the list. In-other-words, you choose Auto Mechanic (Business) and then NYC (City) and hit search, you would get a list of all mechanics enlisted with my website.

thanks for the reply btw.

Serge

[infinityspiral]

Is the search results page already built or that is what you're trying to build as part of this? If you already have a search results page you can just set the action of the search form to that page and have it react to the GET/POST variables created by the form.

If you don't have the search results page you might want to create a separate post in the database section here referencing what you're using like mySQL/php or whatever system you're on. That'll give you a better chance- once a post gets a few responses people figure it's already been answered and the interest in it kinda dies.

[Sribeiro]

No database yet. All I have so far are the animated drop downs. I won't have the actual information for some time as my client is still acquiring more businesses.

Just so I understand this a lil' better - After you choose the Biz and City and you hit Enter where do we go from there? My understanding is - it would go searching in a database with All Businesses and their respective cities, which then would read the users choices and sort it in a list format in a new page (only displaying the users choices). Am I at least close to what the process would be?

I am also assuming mySQL would have to be used for the database, correct?

Serge

[infinityspiral]

Yep that's the flow you'd be looking to create. On the page that uses php to connect to the mysql database you may also want to write in some validation to make sure the information you're getting from the user is the information that is in the drop down. You don't for example, want someone to use firebug to inject a value in a hidden field or something that contains database commands for the database to delete itself.