[thelist] Logic Help (SQL tables)

[Jonathan Lim]

Hi Palyne,

You could use the 2 select box method. Populate the right with everything
from your glossary (simple SELECT) then you would write some javascript to
handle the to and frow bit. Finally, your form handling page would only
worry about the left hand select box.

If you want to prepopulate the left side, then that's another statement
handler(query). To make it neater you may even remove these elements for the
right hand list.

An alternative to all of this is to create another popup which can allow
them to search for glossary items.

And another: Why not let them do a free form search and then deal by
checking if anything they entered is in the glossary?

Might be able to help a bit more if we knew more details. Perl DBI? PHP? CF?
ASP? etc...

Later,
Jon


-----Original Message-----
From: Palyne Gaenir [mailto:palyne at sciencehorizon.com]
Sent: 28 July 2000 12:53
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: [thelist] Logic Help (SQL tables)


Dear Evoltians,

I have a sql-table/form-logic problem I'm hoping someone can help me 
think through.

I am making a table that will hold "a piece of a page" in a textbook 
(to simplify). I have an existing "glossary" table (full of glossary 
terms), and a glossary-affiliation table (empty so far) that links 
each glossary entry to an unlimited number of 'references' to it from 
around the textbook.  

I need to make it so when the user is entering the "piece of textbook 
page" into a simple form, they can also say, "and associate the 
following 1 to 5 glossary terms with this entry."

The problem is, putting an entire bleepin' glossary into a multi 
select box is really not very practical!  And breaking it up into 26 
letter boxes is not very practical either. And I want this to be a 
one-page form (I'm open to a pop-up idea for the choosing, but I 
guess some kind of javascript would be needed to update in that 
case). 

I do need them to choose the values from the glossary list. (Which 
will show them terms, but will insert the term record-ID values into 
a column in the 'piece of page' table.  I'll do a "where IN" query to 
get the gloss terms that match a given 'piece of page' record.)  It's 
just that the list is far too long for a simple multiple-select.

I wondered if some kind of "two column list select" (does such a 
thing exist for sql?) would work?  You know, where one really long 
scrolling list is on the right side, and you click an entry and press 
some kind of <== "add" button and it adds it to the left box, so you 
can see what you've got, and you can "remove" from left as well?  Do 
you think this would work?  I'm not sure via SQL I could bring this 
same box up pre-populated for "edit" purposes...

Surely someone has encountered this problem before?  Needing to have 
a user choose multi entries from a VERY long list of values?  Can 
anyone think of a more practical way to accomplish this goal?

Most grateful regards in advance to all the resident experts,
Palyne

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