I know that title is a little less than explanatory but its hard to describe this in just a few words.
I have a series of Combobox’s, these are used to enter search criteria - then I run the search based on the entries.
What I’d like to do is only show in the combobox entries relevant to other data already entered.
So, Box 1 lists component types, box 2 lists components.
If there is an entry in box 1 of a specific type, then box 2 should show only components of this type.
Its further complicated because there are 8 of these combobox’s, and I’d like to interlink them if possible.
It would be great if I could build this so the user can enter the data in any order (box 8 then box 3 then box 1 etc.) but if necessary I can force user to enetr the data top down (though that seems a bit of a cop-out and I’ll definately get some feedback from the users ).
I suspect I’ll need to generate some SQL each time a box is clicked to show entries that have a WHERE with the previously entered criteria - but I cant figure out how I might link this to the valuelist of the current combobox?
Some Guru guidance on this concept would be appreciated - am I over complicating this ?
You can do this very simple (depending on your data really) by creating 8 valuelists.
The first one shows only the components. The other 7 are valuelist based on relationships based on the combobox before them.
So combobox 2 has a valuelist that uses a relationship that runs from combox1 to your data.
Combobox 3 has a valuelist that uses a relationship that runs from combox2 to your data. etc.
You can do this very simple (depending on your data really) by creating 8 valuelists.
The first one shows only the components. The other 7 are valuelist based on relationships based on the combobox before them.
So combobox 2 has a valuelist that uses a relationship that runs from combox1 to your data.
Combobox 3 has a valuelist that uses a relationship that runs from combox2 to your data. etc.
So no need to type any SQL
Hope this helps.
Thanks Robert that’s the kind of thing I was hoping might be possible - but that ‘will’ limit the user to a top down entry pattern, and where there is no entry in a particular box (box 3 for example) there would be no inherited link for the valuelist for box 4, how might I accommodate that do you think?
If you need it to be more dynamic then I suggest you use the onDataChange event on the fields and use a method to fill the valuelist(s) accordingly using a dataset and the application.setValueListItems() function.