Trying to use DD for what it's not intended for.

Based on this thread, I already know at least part of the answer to my question -
showthread.php?t=18421

I have a customer table that includes the Customer Name, City and State. A Customer may have more than one location, and I want to user to easily choose the correct one. Unfortunately, in these instances there may be multiple records with the same customer name, but different locations.

I can't concatenate these fields for the list label because the drop down box would be too wide. I can't populate a text field as a child field using DD with the location information.

But, can I populate a second list menu with the location info from the record ID selected in the parent list, all getting their data from the same table?

I know I should create the link table according to how DD is meant to be used linking the Distinct customer name to all it's possible locations, but that's out of the scope of this project - and the customer table is very large and that would be time consuming.

Any ideas of how to make this work with or without DD? TIA!

I think this could be done using dynamic dropdowns.


you are looking to have one list for customers, when a customer is selected, populate another list of possible states, when the state list is selected populate another list of possible cities. Is that correct?


In the first list, the customer name will be used for both the label and the value.


the recordset to populate the State Dynamic Array will be configured as:

SELECT customerName, state, CONCAT(customerName, '', state) AS custState FROM customers


in the Create Dynamic array behavior, set the customerName as the parent ID, custState as child ID and state as child label

the recordset for states will be created as

SELECT city, CONCAT(customerName, '', state) AS custState FROM customers

in the Create Dynamic array behavior, set the custState as the parent ID, city as child ID and city as child label



NOTE: In the create dynamic array behavior, you wont be able to select the aliased column that is created in the recordset, you will need to select a different column, then edit the code afterward to set it to use the aliased column.

Doing away with my initial question in the thread title, I think the best solution is to use DD the way it's designed with one exception - can I set up the parent-child list menu relationship based only on a single table in the database? Your solution may already address this, I will have to experiment a little.

Let's say the table contains 4 instances of ACME Corp in the company name field. They are distinguished by their locations, and we can treat city and state as a single entity. Originally I was thinking to use DD to simply display the corresponding location when the user selected one of the company name instances as it would show up in the parent list all four times. But that is clunky as they may have to make repeat selections.

So now, I plan on filtering the recordset on distinct company name (also greatly reducing the length of the list), and populating the child list menu with the four different locations. To do this the normal way, I would have to populate each record with a foreign key, then create a second table linking those keys to locations, correct?

So instead, could I just treat the company name as the identifier when creating the dynamic array? That would leave me with the four actual ACME Corp records, where I could combine the city and state to populate the child list labels, and the actual primary key ID as the value.

Thanks Jason!

yes, if you read through my reply, It explains how to accomplish exactly what you are asking about.