Ajax is quite fun to play with, looks good on the CV etc - also stops the
screen actually looking as if it's being refreshed (makes it look like your
computer's running slow instead in bad cases)
 In this situation, if I understand it correctly, there's no great advantage
to it since you have to wait until the user chooses something from the first
dropdown before you can populate the second one. Three choices seem to be
available:
 A) The user picks their first choice and submits the form - you send a
whole new page.
B) You shove all the second options in a big eff-off array and when the user
picks an option it all happens client-side (this gets to be a problem if
there are loads of second options)
C) You use Ajax to retrieve the second options when the users selects the
first option
 To me, all of these seem to have the problem that the user has to actually
pick the first option before you can do anything useful. A) and C) mean you
don't have to send loads of data of which the majority will be unused.
 B) means it will be quicker once the page has loaded but slower to load.
 For Ajax to be useful, you really need to split the selection into more
than two options: e.g. manufacturer -> machine type -> Spare part type
(bearings, lubricants, etc) -> Spare part list. Trouble is, the chances are
your database isn't designed for that.
 I'd go for A) from the sound of it.
 Ian


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