Creating a custom select/combo box with milonic

Shap5202 · Post by **Shap5202** » Thu Dec 22, 2005 5:03 pm

Hey guys. After reading this post http://milonic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4238 and looking at the code example, it seems like a really cool thing to do, especially when our system can have user-defined values in drop-downs 80+ characters long. (really does a number on our screen design).

My/our worry was just about performance/data size. At it's worst, we have a screen with about 75 select boxes currently (normaly is probably between 5-15/20). Was wondering what the overhead would be to have that many of the 'milonic select boxes' on the screen at once. while there's not too much more HTML (replace the <option> tags with aI()'s basically) it could mean a bunch of javascript calls and extra hidden elements to store the form values.
Most of the menu grunt work is done client-side i guess right?

Anyways, long question short, a big concern is response time, both page loading and reaction. With potential for large amounts of data, do you think this would be a problem?

Thanks.

Post by **Ruth** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 4:09 am

Hi,

I don't do forms at all, however, there was a post about one with a special function by Andy to allow a click in a form box to open a milonic menu for the selections.

This is the post I can find, I'm looking for he original one, unless this was a direct contact to Milonic for the function, but I'd guess you can figure out what the function is if you have the page which is below the topic link.

viewtopic.php?t=6774

http://rimea.org/forms/allstate/test1.html

There seem to be a lot of select boxes which pop up milonic menus so I thought that would give you some idea.

Ruth

Post by **Ruth** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 4:11 am

Hmm, I just realized the boxes at the bottom are popping up the same menu so maybe it isn't on point.

And did you take a look at the select boxes demo?

http://support.milonic.com/demos/select_box/index.htm

Ruth

Shap5202 · Post by **Shap5202** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 4:52 am

actually, yes. did see that sample and are coming to grips with the fact that we'll probably have to code our own combo/select box to get the fancy functionality the users want.

One customer group that did get a newer version of our system with the milonic menus said they noticed a performance decrease in the web so we were just worried about introducing something else to slow down the page more. But i'll play around with that stuff tomorrow some perhaps

thanks ruth

Shap5202 · Post by **Shap5202** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 4:57 am

Oh, and that other site you linked actually might be close to what we're looking for too. thanks!

wkilc · Post by **wkilc** » Sat Dec 24, 2005 2:54 am

Hi all,

That was my site Ruth quoted above (Hi Ruth!)... I orginally posted in the "off-topic" forum... at the time I was simple looking for advice... I wanted to have multiple pull-down menus in one form but didn't want the redundancy of having to enter the same 30+ item menu multiple times... the page would have been too heavy, for starters. I was simply looking for advice from folks that have forgotten more about coding than I will ever know.

At the time, Andy was kind enough to offer a solution.... orginal idea was to create these "mock" pull-downs using the menu, using a fake "graphic" arrow as the target for clicking (making them look like authenic pull-down form selects)... the someone else suggested we add "onfocus" as well as "onclick" in case anyone tried to tab through the form... they would still see the menu.

On my site... I re-direct folks that have JS disabled before they arrive at these forms... they are meant for a specific number of members in our little site... and has worked VERY well last year for our festival registration.

Good luck.

Milonic rules!

~Wayne