Creating dynamic pop-up menus

There are two facets of dynamic pop-up menus. You can control both where the value selected in the pop-up menu comes from (and in the case of an update action, where it goes to), and you can also control the list of values that is displayed when the user clicks the pop-up menu. Usually, these bindings are to completely different content sources. For example, the list of values may be populated using one table in your database, but the pop-up list may also be bound to a different table in your database for, say, data entry purposes.

Recall that values in a pop-up menu come in two parts: a label (which is displayed in the screen) and a value (which is sent to the server as the value of the field).

For example, suppose you have a database table listing languages and encoding names. There might be a record that has a Language field with value U.S. English and an Encoding field with value EN_US. Fill in a pop-up menu with label or value pairs from this content source.

To fill in the pop-up values of a pop-up menu:

1. Drag a Bound Pop-up object from the Dynamic Content set of the Objects palette into the form on your page.
2. In the Dynamic Bindings palette, select the Construct Dynamically option, and select a content source.
3. Set the value field (Encoding for the example) and label field (Language field for the example) that contain the values you want in your pop-up menu.

To connect the value of a pop-up menu to a content source field:

1. Drag a Bound Pop-up object from the Dynamic Content set of the Objects palette into the form on your page, or select a pop-up menu you already have on your form.
2. In the Dynamic Bindings palette, select the content source and field that contain the values you want in your pop-up menu.

Creating a dynamic list box follows the same procedure, except that you drag out a Bound List Box object.