Multi-option checkboxes. Suggestion?
James Masters
buttons (which can only have one value) so that more than one checkbox
in a list can be selected. e.g. a user might check 3 checkboxes:
apples, oranges & pears out of a list of 10 fruit.
HTML deals with this badly because the only way to do this (AFAIK) is
to create a differently name checkbox for each option and then a
script is forced to assess the name of the form field in order to work
out which of the options are checked.
I may be wrong here but I think that checkboxes are dealt with by
RHTMLO in exactly the same way as radio buttons. I've setting up a
form with checkbox that will allow multiple values to be selected and
am therefore having to create individual checkbox fields rather than
use a checkboxgroup because a single name won't do.
However, it occurred to me that Rose could probably hide the
cumbersome HTML behaviour and have a type CheckboxMultigroup or
something that would create differently name checkboxes and then upon
receipt agglomerate them back into a single field that could be
interrogated in a slightly different way to a radiobutton/
checkboxgroup to allow for multiple values.
This is just a suggestion because it would be a convenient thing. But
if this can be done somehow already, then it's not a suggestion, it's
a question....
thanks,
James.
John Siracusa
> Is is sometimes desireable to use checkboxes differently to radio
> buttons (which can only have one value) so that more than one checkbox
> in a list can be selected. e.g. a user might check 3 checkboxes:
> apples, oranges & pears out of a list of 10 fruit.
>
> HTML deals with this badly because the only way to do this (AFAIK) is
> to create a differently name checkbox for each option
This is not the case. What RHTMLO does (and what the HTML standards
explicitly support) is use the same name="..." but a different
value="..." for each checkbox HTML element. Submitting such a form
results in a query that contains the same query param with multiple
values. For example:
size=123&lang=en&lang=fr&lang=de
Your web framework or CGI engine or other such code should convert
such a submission into a hash suitable for passing to RHTMLO's
params() method:
{
size => 123,
lang => [ 'en', 'fr', 'de' ],
}
From the HTMLO 4.01 spec (merely the first place I looked to grab a quote):
"Several checkboxes in a form may share the same control name. Thus,
for example, checkboxes allow users to select several values for the
same property."
That's what a CheckBoxGroup is modeling: a single property with multiple values.
-John
James Masters
misunderstanding for so long. When I did it like this, my debugging
routine that list cgi params passed only showed one value so I had
assumed any other selected values were lost. I've fixed my debugging
routine and all is clear. Thanks.