[albatross-users] Limitations of al-select and al-option

[Sheila King]

Hello,

I'm trying to implement a drop-down menu on a form, and either the 
al-select/al-option mechanism is rather limited, or I just don't understand 
something.

Here is *my* understanding of the al-select, and please correct me if I am 
wrong:

(1) If I have a list, such as optionlist, I can do the following to 
generate an entire drop-down select menu:

<al-select name="mymenuname" optionexpr="optionlist" />

However, the problem as far as I can see, with the above, is that I cannot 
get option tags that have a separate "value" attribute.

For example, if I want to display to the web site visitor some text data, 
but I want to have the form return an integer (such as a category ID in a 
MySQL table), I cannot see how I could get that from the above structure?

(2) I can't use an al-for to generate this either, as the al-select tag 
ignores any al-option tags that are not "direct children" of the al-select 
tag.

So it appears that I cannot generate HTML code such as:

<select name="mymenuname">
<option value="1">option 1</option>
<option value="2">option 2</option>
<option value="3">option 3</option>
</select>

If I'm missing something, and there is a way to generate HTML as shown 
above, please clue me in. Right now I'm getting around this by making extra 
MySQL queries to convert the text "option 1" into the integer value that I 
would really like the form to return for me.

Thanks for any hints,

-- 
Sheila King
http://www.thinkspot.net/sheila/
http://www.k12groups.org