mrc Documentation
michaels, ross & cole, ltd.
http://www.mrc-productivity.com/

Cascading Drop Down Lists

Web 2.0 applications have the added feature which allows your dropdown lists to be reliant on one another. Let’s say you have a report where your end-user picks State, County, and City. At run time this will allow your users to select a state from a dropdown list. When they do, the dropdown list for counties and cities will refresh to show only the valid counties and cities for that state. Choosing a county will list all of the applicable cities for that particular county.

Rather than adding “A” to the User Defined Field Control to make the lists be “Dropdowns” (as you did in the Classic Report templates), choose “B” for each field.

Be sure that whichever fields you place a “B” on for User Defined Field Control that you also specify them as a “?” for Record Selection so your end-user will be prompted.

Be sure to specify the template type as “Web 2.0 Report.”

At run time, your end user would see a screen like this: Notice that we have four states in our list.

Because we choose Illinois as a state, we are only returned with IL counties.

Because we choose Cook County, we are only shown cities that reside within Cook County.

Note: If a user selects an incorrect field, or changes their mind, they will need to choose the blank field before their list will update again back to the original listing.

Notice that if we select a different state, for instance Colorado, we are shown the valid counties for that state.

Because Summit county was selected, only the Summit County cities are displayed.

Note: The Cascading Dropdown Lists do not have to follow a top down order. In the example above, I could have chosen a City first, then a county, than a state.