Thread: Can this be done....

I want to insert a tool with drop down menus similar to what you see on a lot of flight booking sites, for people to plan travel itineries....

I already have the data (just in Excel Spreadsheet right now) that looks a bit like the rough table below

(A,B,C and D are places and the numbers represent distances, if '/' means route not possible, table is obviously symetrical)

..........A......B......C......D

A........-.......4......7......2

B........4.......-....../.......3

C........7......./......-.......5

D........2.......3......5.......-


I want to create a tool on my site where:

-the user can choose their starting location from a drop down menu (with A B, C and D in it in this case)
-then, based on this choice they a choose a 2nd location from another drop down menu that gives the possible locations (so if B chosen, only A and D in 2nd menu)
-they then get an output of the distance (so B chosen, followed by A returns 4)
-they can then continue to add additional locations (so another drop down menu would need to appear every time) until they have planned a full trip.

On my table I have 22 locations. I hope I have explained what I would like achieve well enough..

Can this be done within bluevoda or a forms program of some sort (if so how would I go about it?), or would I need to buy some software?

Any help would be great as I have played around with Excel for too long now and looked on the web for software with any luck.

Thanks

It can be done using chained dropdown lists, using Javascript. Not directly in BV. You also need to define how many steps are required(f.e. a trip is made of 5 or 10 or howevera limited number of intermediate stops).

Having looked into this it seems to be very complicated... Which seems strange as all it is, is reporting values from a table.

Would you say it is a job for a programmer? Or is does anyone know of any good resources on this?