Hello,

I am wondering how this website populates its selections for what the user selects:

http://www.justseatcovers.com/Catalog/index.cfm?categoryID=9

What is .cfm? And is this easy to create?

Did the creator have to manually input each option for each year/type to match with an inventory number?

Thank You

.cfm is coldfusion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldfusion

I have never used it but it has a lot of built in functions. At one time it was seen as a potential future for web development but it has never really broken through to mass popularity. It is used by some businesses though as you have seen.

.cfm is coldfusion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldfusion

I have never used it but it has a lot of built in functions. At one time it was seen as a potential future for web development but it has never really broken through to mass popularity. It is used by some businesses though as you have seen.

Ah, where is it pulling the references from?

Surprisingly it seems to be populating it from a javascript function!

Hello,

I am wondering how this website populates its selections for what the user selects:

http://www.justseatcovers.com/Catalog/index.cfm?categoryID=9

What is .cfm? And is this easy to create?

Here is half the answer. CFM is the default extension for projects built in Cold Fusion MX7.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/7/htmldocs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=ColdFusion_Documentation&file=00001124.htm


--Michael

Surprisingly it seems to be populating it from a javascript function!

Really? How do you know this? Can I see the javascript they use?

The magic's done here:
<select onchange="form.submit();"...
Each time you change a selection the form is submitted to the server with the extra information. No doubt the server-side program then looks up the make / model etc. specified by the user in their database and presents more options or (finally) the product. The page is small enough and loads fast enough so you don't notice it, but it would have been cooler done with AJAX. ;)

Edit: To dig into how web pages work for yourself, get Firefox and install the Web Developer and Firebug plugins.

The magic's done here:
<select onchange="form.submit();"...
Each time you change a selection the form is submitted to the server with the extra information. No doubt the server-side program then looks up the make / model etc. specified by the user in their database and presents more options or (finally) the product. The page is small enough and loads fast enough so you don't notice it, but it would have been cooler done with AJAX. ;)

Edit: To dig into how web pages work for yourself, get Firefox and install the Web Developer and Firebug plugins.

Would this be difficult to have made for me?

Did the creator have to manually input each option for each year/type to match with an inventory number?



Probably - although they may have a nicely designed administration interface that makes it very quick to do this.

What you're looking at in ColdFusion could equally well be done in PHP, ASP.net or even Perl. Don't go on the hunt for a ColdFusion developer - they will be hard to come-by and probably expensive. Just find someone to do it for you in PHP.

Would this be difficult to have made for me?The coding's not difficult, but the real question is: do you already have a database of car makes and models to work from?

I have seen websites sorta like http://www.mediamaxscript.com/

Some sites i have seen offer those type scripts with cars/makes/models/years etc.. all preloaded.

Sure a quick googlesearch will come up with somethin

I haven't got the time to take his script apart but I have done similar things with all the options in javascript arrays, so its entirely possible its done that way. If the values are in arrays then its quite easy to update changes to specification in one place.

The coding's not difficult, but the real question is: do you already have a database of car makes and models to work from?

I would probably have an excel sheet with all the information, would I be able to import that?

Thanks

Yes, if the information's in any consistent format you should be able to write an import script to handle it. I'd suggest getting the main program done first to finalize the database design, then write the import script.