Search triggered by menu selection, menu's holding selection after visiting another page

Working with this page http://teamconstructioninc.com/inspiration/detail.php?room=10&Search=Search&WADbSearch1=Submit

The client would like to have the search triggered automatically by any one of the menus being selected as opposed to selecting the menu and then pressing the search button. How would I go about doing this?

Secondly, on another search/results page http://teamconstructioninc.com/homes/semi-custom/ ... It does great holding the menu selections as the user searches. However, if the user navigates away to another page and then returns, the search results still hold the criteria, but the menus no longer reflect the selections and appear as if the user is looking at all results. We want it to hold the search as it does, but we want the menu's to reflect that properly even if the user navigates away.

Triggering the search automatically can be done simply by using the onchange event to submit the form: onchange="this.form.submit()"

However that will cause a page refresh and would make doing multiple selections in the three lists very awkward as the page refreshes. The better way to do it is to put the results into a plugin and refresh it with AJAX using the onchange event. This can be done using the same technique as described in the dynamic dropdowns tutorial, you are just refreshing the results instead of a second dropdown: http://www.webassist.com/tutorials/Dynamic-Dropdowns-with-Data-Bridge-2-0

To maintain the values in the select lists, just save their values into session variables or use the persist form server behavior to save their values and pre-populate them with the saved value from the session.

I'll look into the AJAX function... in the interim I tried to do the onchange, but it's not working to put it into the form tag like the following:

<form class="search-form" id="Search_Basic_Default" name="Search_Basic_Default" method="get" action="detail.php#photo-results" onchange="this.form.submit()" >

Where is it supposed to go?

in the <select> menus you want to submit onchange... not the form.