posted 17 years ago
There's a common way to do it - it's a trick! Even normal GUI's often use this approach:
Basically, you create a text box control and a droplist control and locate them at the same place. By setting up the right event handlers, you move them up or down on the Z axis for the page so that subsequent UI events go into one or the other. Then, on top of that, if the action was a list selection, you'd make its event handler copy the selected text into the text edit box control so that the text box would be the one-stop location for getting results.
You might want to google around for JavaScript or AJAX resources named "DropDownComboList", "ComboBox" or variants on that. And let me know what you find - I might need one myself some day!
Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other.
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Benjamin Franklin - Postal official and Weather observer