Imagine 3 select menus: one listing Locations, another listing Systems (deployed at a location), and a third listing Components (that make up a system).
The interface would work such that by choosing a location, that location's systems would be displayed, and by choosing a system it's component's would be displayed. I have done this type of interface before with small data sets by dynamically creating Javascript that preloads arrays, but in the interface in question the Component's table will have thousands of rows so using the javascript technique would result in a very large script download.
If I am reading this right you could always treat this as multiple pages(unless you wanted one huge list). You could show 50, 100 or 200 components at a time, with the navigation for "previous page 1-50 51-100 101-150 next page" etc. This would make your query of the data faster to load. With so many components per system per location it would almost be easier to make a simple little search engine that took in direct queries for sets of data on the server side. From each set allow the user to select a specific component.
I see possible solutions to either of these scenarios involving response to a "form event" that would trigger a query back to the database that would return some information that would be parsed and used to populate a specific select menu or form input field. I would also like to do this without having to request and render an entire page. I seem to recall discussions on this or other lists that hinted this could be achieved using Javascript and a small frame (invisible?) that is used as a "broker" to send and receive query results?
You could use the <IFRAME> tag anywhere in your web page like:
<html> <body> <---HTML CONTENT-->
<iframe id="broker_frame" width="1" height="1" src=""></iframe>
<---MORE HTML CONTENT--> </body> </html>
and you could use javascript to perform the form submissions and data requests into the iframe, then pull them into the parent frame as needed.
As far as links to give i don't have any, but ideas and practices I have many. Hope it helps.
Zach Dennis Market Technologies Inc.
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