Posted by Richard Lynch on 05/14/05 09:14

On Fri, May 13, 2005 5:59 am, Andre Dubuc said:
> However, the behavior continues intermittently. I've duplicated it one
> time.
> If I click on the 'State' dropdown list, allow the mouse to scan through
> it,
> but do not choose a value, and then immediately go to the previous or next
> field and click on it, the box where 'USA or Canada' appears will be blank
> (despite '<option selected value="In USA or Canada">In USA or
> Canada</option>'). For the life of me, I cannot figure why it's doing
> that.

This is a browser/OS bug.

It's possible that it's even time-dependent -- That if you click in the
popup list before it's fully formed, then you can make this happen, but
after it gets completely built, you can't duplicate this.

At any rate, there is nothing you can do about it.

Well, okay, you can complain to the browser-makers, and be ignored by them...

I guess one thing that *MIGHT* help would be to ob_start() before you send
out all the option tags, and then ob_flush()/flush() after the /select
closing tag.

The purpose being that you want the browser to build the whole menu with
as few interruptions as possible, so it will not get used while it is
half-built.

I would not RELY on this actually fixing the problem for sure 100% every
time you betcha, but it could reduce the incidence.

> As a hack, I've included a new routine checking for blank or null value
> for
> $selstate that snags problems before they hit the database. However, I'd
> rather know why this is happening.

Browsers and the data coming from them are flaky, if not downright hostile.

That's just how life is.

It's not a problem to solve. It's a state of being to accept and plan
for. :-)

Maybe it's time to just re-write the script the right way, the way you
would do it today... :-)

You probably have already spent more time trying to figure this out than
it would have taken to just re-code it with your better experience.

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