Re: Option Transfer in QF

Justin Patrin wrote:

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 15:35:58 -0800, Ken Restivo <ken@restivo.org> wrote:

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 02:15:51PM -0800, Justin Patrin wrote:

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 13:53:15 -0800, Ken Restivo <ken@restivo.org> wrote:

Has anyone implemented multiselect option transfer using QF? I'd rather not be blazing new ground on which no human has ever tread. Basically an option-transfer is somewhat similar to a heirselect, and if I had to implement it myself I'd probably start by subclassing or copy-pasting the heirselect code. Here's a non-QF example: http://www.quirksmode.org/js/transfer.html

<snip> Funny you should ask now. There are no currently published implementations, but Jamie Alessio is working on one (CCed to this message). It may even be done by now. Check the PEAR-Dev list for the discussion about it.

Interesting... and pretty slick. Alas, I can't use it. His advmultselect implementation (with your suggestion of a hidden field) now seems to use JS exclusively and won't work at all in non-JS browsers. But there are some good ideas there and that will help me along, thanks.

Ah...I didn't read your entire post. Well, there's no easy way to make such a thing work without JS. Jamie's version is going to be a normal multiselect when there's no JS support. Making this kind of thing work without JS would put lots of limitations on the script that uses it. It would certainly break QFs in many situations to submit but not process normally. IMHO if someone has turned off JS (or it's not supported) a normal multi-select is fine. JS is pretty ubiquitous now and it's needed for any kind of dynamic processing. Ken,

I must admit that I didn't see your entire original post either. Somehow your message never made it over to the gmane.org news server which is what I read this list from so I was responding only to what Justin had included. I didn't realize you were proposing to move the values back and forth with trips to the server and additional PHP+QF processing. This approach seems do-able and you probably won't even need to make any changes to the QF code. Instead, you'll just need your PHP script to check which button on the form caused the 'submit' and if it was one of the buttons that is for the option transfer just skip past QF's validate functions and redraw the form with the data moved between your two multi-selects. I'm sure that's a grossly over-simplified version but I'm thinking it won't be too tricky to implement (and in my opinion, probably way less tricky than accomplishing it with javascript). - Jamie