Hi everybody,
Im rebuilding a course database for a college's website and im in need of some advice.

I have a selection box which im using for selecting multiple subjects.
As there is a many to many relationship i have a table for joining the records. When updating the course I want the previously selected subjects to be selected when the page loads so the user can unselect them to remove that subject from the course. would my best option be to delete the previous records then add them all again?

That's usually the way you have to do it because there's no simple way to telling from the posted data of an HTML form what was "un-selected". This applies to checkboxe and select controls. The easiest way is to just clean out all records applicable then add in the selected ones.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

Another thing. I first thought getting the already selected options selected when the page loads would be a simple case of checking against the record set, forgetting that it would have to loop through each record in the rs for each option, is there a better way? would it be best to put all the id numbers into a string then doing an instr() for each option, this page is only going to be used by a few people at a time (like 3 or 4 max)

thanks for your help
Andy

I think in the end you are best off to just delete all appropriate rows and then insert the currently selected ones.

Think about it this way... what makes more sense:

A) select current rows from DB, loop thru results, test against current selected items, figure out which to remove, remove them, add new ones.

B) Remove all applicable rows, add all selected items.

Why do all that extra work in option A)? It's going to be less efficient and more hastle.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

thats for all the advice :)
i thought this was going to take a while to figure out as im only a novice. Its only taken me a couple of hours to get the whole thing done.
Nice one mate!