Populating a Drop Down Menu with Info. from a Database

Surviving the basics
A drop down menu is the most popular way to cram a lot of links into a small space. A drop down menu (also called a "drop down") is a list of web pages. The user selects one of the options and presses, the choice that has been selected will then stay selected permanently. For example, this drop down gives you three options:

Altavista Google Lycos

The code for the basic drop down list is like this

Using Active Server Page's (ASP) to our advantage
Drop Downs are tremendously useful and they are commonly used for forms throughout the WWW. We can use our new found programming language to our advantage to develop a easier way to manage our drop down lists, and that method involves building a database

Firstly what we need to do is build our database to hold our information for the drop down list. In this example we will build a drop down which will contain a list of countries around the world.

Our database table would look like:

Entering the information
Once the table has been built, we need to enter our information.

We enter into the second column each different country we need to enter and for each country we would like to appear on the page we enter a 1 into the show column. For every country we do not want to appear we enter a 0 in the show column. Something like this below.

Developing our Active Server Page
Once the table has been built, start to build our ASP page. The below code is the top of the HTML code.

Now we start to write out the ASP code.

The variable sTestSQL set in the second line of the ASP code holds the SQL statement which will pull all the information out of the table we have previously created. The third line creates the server object for the database, whilst the fourth line specifies the link to our database using DSN . The last line of the code executes the SQL statement contained in sTestSQL on our table.

We know loop through all the values displaying the shown fields from our table. The ASP code not only displays the drop down information but also the drop down value. You can check this on the finished article by viewing the source and seeing if the two values are in the Option tag.

The last lines of code finish off the drop down box. The Response.write line of the code closes the select tag, the second and third close the record set and four and five closes the database connection

Conclusion
The advantages of adding a database driven drop down list are as follows:

• Easy to maintain
• Saves replicating data, that is stored in a database, onto a HTML page
• More accurate