Setting and getting a drop down list selection

Raemon_777,

I don't know a direct way to do this, but I can figure out a roundabout method. Here's what I know, which isn't all that much...

A dropdownlist object has an "items" property, which is an array of listitem objects that represent the selections. For example, in your list that contains "a", "b", and "c", you'll have three listitems in the array. Furthermore, each listitem has two important properties:

"text" which is the text value that displays

"index" which is the index in the "items" array, starting at 0 for the first one.

So, in the a,b,c example, you have these properties:

dropDown.items[0].text     (equals "a")

dropDown.items[0].index   (equals 0)

dropDown.items[1].text   (equals "b")

dropDown.items[1].index   (equals 1)

dropDown.items[2].text   (equals "c")

dropDown.items[2].index   (equals 2)

And, the "selection" property of the dropdown object is just a reference to one of these listitems object. So, if you want to make the list show "c", you could do:

dropDown.selection = dropDown.items[2]

...but, you say you don't know the index, just the text value. So, I worked up this little function which seems to do the trick. Send it the dropdownlist object and the text value you want displayed. It will find the correct listitem object and set it as the "selection" property, rather than your previous method that was simply resetting the text value of the current selection listitem.

Like I said, there might be a better way to do this. In a hurry, this is the best I could conjure up.

Russ

function SetDropDown(dropdown, value)

{

    for(i = 0; i < dropdown.items.length; i++)

    {

       if(dropdown.items.text == value)

       {

           dropdown.selection = dropdown.items;

           i = dropdown.items.length;

       }

    }

}