How do you change what choices are shown based on the choices made in another variable in a record producer?

[mahudg2]

I'm creating a record producer where a category and subcategory is shown.

Subcategory and category are both custom variables that are drop down lists. But I want the subcategories to be based off what category is shown.

For example when someone chooses phone for the category I'd like the subcategory to show phone related items.

Would this be a good place to use variable sets?

[solutioningnow]

Hi Sach,

I'll also check this and get back to you on this

Regards,

Solutioner

[bgworld]

Hi sach,

We created separate global function which can be used anywhere (UI Script). we had some extra things to take care as well.

Following is the workaround:

function removeOptions(selectbox,choiceValue)

{

      var i;

      for(i=selectbox.options.length-1;i>=0;i--)

      {

                if (selectbox.options[i].value == choiceValue) {

                selectbox.remove(i);

                break;

          }

      }

}

//using the function:

removeOptions(document.getElementById("mySelectObject"),choiceValue);

this works on all browsers

Hope it Helps !

[sach1]

can this be embedded with the above script you mentioned ?

[mduluk · Accepted solution]

I don't see a dependent in catalog variables like they have in Choice lists on forms.   What you might need to do is use the catalog UI policies.     Make a different sub-cause for each choice in the cause.   So if you had 5 causes, then there would be 5 different sub cause variables.     Then use the UI policies to hide the different sub causes until the correct cause is chosen.   This sounds messy, so hopefully someone else can come up with a better idea.

[Mike Moody]

The way I handled this in our CTI structure, is that I created custom tables for Category, Type, and Subtype respectively. Then I created reference type fields on the Record Producer and used advanced reference qualifiers that would pass in the currently selected value of the dependent field(s). This advanced reference qualifier would then query a many to many table that I created which linked together all the valid Category/Type/Subtype combinations. Finally I created two Catalog Client Scripts which were responsible for performing an AJAX call to a Script Include to check if a dependent field still had a valid value once it's field it was dependent on changed, if not it would clear the value in that field. That's just another way to consider handling this, it also has the added benefit of being able to scale your CTI structure by creating additional custom tables for another subcategory level and simply adding a new reference field to the many to many table.