[thelist] Andrew's drill-down problem (was: Select - forms)

[rudy]

> So the problem was solved 

erik, i don't think it was

andrew, your last post said a couple of things that
were very interesting

  "The best way to filter towns and cities is via counties
   (and I would predict that 50% of the population have no
   idea what county they are in)"

if half your target audience cannot use the UI (user interface)
because the first thing it asks for is county, then it can hardly
be called the best way, can it

then you close by saying

  "Anyway the simple answer to all of this 
   (just for the brain surgeons amongst you) 
   is to have no records selected at all and 'no javascript'
   >---  Please Select a County      --<
   >--   Please Select a Town / City --<
   >--   Please Select an Industry   --< "

okay, i'm not a brain surgeon, and i don't see how this is better

three dropdowns is still very confusing to a user, especially if 
two of the three appear to be hierarchical

(disclaimer: i have done no user surveys other than informal ones, 
of a sample size of one, namely me)

the three selected (or not) dropdown values are submitted (or not)
when the form is submitted, so your action script will have to handle 
them whether they were selected (or not), in this context --

  ( county OR city ) AND industry

but since one or more of these may be dummy (or missing), you need 
the sql that does the search to be properly formed

i have seen lots of queries say AND where they should have said OR,
or leave out the parentheses

furthermore, say i wanted all industries in a specific city, i would
leave the industry dropdown unselected

now, one does not need to be an sql specialist to anticipate this
problem, which, as i suggested, is really a User Interface problem

well, maybe not for industry

to be more specific, if you anticipate that users might leave the
industry dropdown unselected, AND IF you wanted to allow this, then
you would code for it, either by forcing the form to submit a dummy 
value, or detecting the absence of the field in the action script

but look at the implication of counties and cities

if you want the user to pick a county first, that gets coded one
particular way (possibly by separate pages, as you had initially)

if you have dropdowns for both county and city on the same form, 
you will definitely need different code

see, i don't agree with you that there are 1001 different solutions
but they're all for the same problem

my suggestion is to decide first how you want the form(s) to work

the UI, to use the fashionable buzzword

in case it helps, andrew, i myself do not have a solution 

it is indeed a difficult UI problem

in the united states of america, the same city name occurs in
multiple states, so you need a way of letting people select
either a state or a city, and if a city, then which one

in canada we have provinces and cities, and people more likely
know which province they're in, because each one is so large...
well, except PEI... oh, and i guess Nunavut, which isn't really
a province, it's a territory, actually it was carved out of
the northwest territories in 1999, which wreaked no end of havoc
because its postal code remained NT, causing duplicate keys all
across the country in database tables which had foolishly
made the postal code the primary key... but i digress...

and if we did away with top level of the hierarchy (county), 
the city dropdown would be so long as to be unusable

attempts to "solve" this include trying to write javascript
to position the select at the city whose first letter(s) are
typed in via keyboard, or dynamic javascript where a choice
of county alters the contents of the city dropdown (a poor
solution because all cities in all counties have to be sent
to the browser)

to further complicate matters, consider that geographic proximity 
may not be the only way the user wants to search for businesses

for example, say i wanted to contact candlestick makers in each of 
several cities in a county, because that's where i have properties 
that, um, require candlesticks

i'd want the city dropdown list to allow MULTIPLE

which is a totally different UI, isn't it?  think of the sql...

and should a business only be returned if it's in all selected
cities, or merely any one of them? 

that'll affect the sql too

and what if neither county nor city is selected? should selecting 
an industry alone return all of the businesses in that industry
across all counties, or would that produce too many results?

and anyway, how should multiple businesses be presented? 
by city name or business name?  or industry?

the only person, in this entire thread, who may never, under
any circumstances, be allowed to lapse into a state of confusion
is the user

like i said, this isn't a code problem at all

rudy