Related Multi-Selects, iframes, ajax, other?

[johkar]

I have several related multi-selects on a page (country, state/
province, city, address). There are 4 - 7 other unrelated fields on
the page also. Even though this is an intranet app where a
traditional submit is normally very fast, there are other user/design
considerations which make submitting the entire page not as desirable.

I am just looking for some verification that an iframe returning an
array would be fine. I have not worked with Ajax, but would consider
it if there were significant advantages (I think you can stop a
request). I am also worried about using onchange with multi-selects,
additional requests could be firing before results are returned.

 

[Richard Cornford]

David Golightly wrote:

... pretty much the only circumstance under which iframes
are advantageous to XHR is for file uploads, which is impossible
with current XHR implementations and security restrictions.

<snip>

That is not really true. It should be entirely possible to assemble the
body of a multipart post request contain appropriately encode data that
would be taken as an uploaded file when received at the server. So you
could create a 'file' in memory and upload it to a server. The impossible
part is getting a file from the user's hard disk and putting its contents
into a javascript string, under the normal security constraints.

Richard.