Dynamic drop down lists

[Gary]

I need to have two drop down menus in most of my products for sizes. The problem is that some options are only available in certain sizes....

Basically, the problem is like this:

Menu one has three options.
Menu two has eight options.

If the customer chooses option 1 from menu one, menu two must not display options 3, 5 or 6.
If the customer then changes menu one to option 2, those three options in menu two need to become available again, and options 7 and 8 need to dissapear.

As far as I'm aware, it's not too difficult to achieve in web pages using a bit of Javascript or something similar, but there's no way of doing it in the Catalog.

Has anyone else had this problem? Found a way around it?

[cdicken]

There is no way to build this into the Actinic templates, simply because the rules will change so much from product to product.

The only thing you can do is create a component within the product and then put your two attributes within the component. If you then go into the component and click 'Fill List', Actinic will list all the possible combinations of choices that can be made. You can then un-tick 'Valid' for any combinations that you do not want to be orderable. This makes no difference to the HTML, but it will give an error message when people try and order an invalid combination of choices.

[Gary]

Yeah, I found that option, and that's what I'm using now... It's not ideal, but it'll have to do. The only problem is, I can't find out where to edit the error message... instead of it re-dirceting the customer to the page they were just at, it goes straight back to my homepage!

Any ideas on that one? It's pretty frustrating if a customer makes an invalid combination, and then has to go through the whole catalog before they can try again...

[cdicken]

It shouldn't do this - it should only return you to the last page viewed.

Wait a minute - do you by any chance have Norton Internet Security 2003 installed? This introduces a problem with Actinic whereby it strips out the details of where Actinic is trying to return you to - so Actinic takes you to the front page of the store.

[Gary]

No I don't have Norton IS or Firewall or whatever else... I have to explain that one to customers a billion times a week, but not me.

[garyhay]

I have a script to do this but the site is down at the moment I will look it up later.

[cdicken]

Hmmm. When I try this on my 6.1.3 it works fine. Do you have a URL we can see online to check out your store?

[Gary]

Sure, it's: http://hemp-bags.co.uk/body_jewellery_shop.htm.

Click on the second icon (alt = 'Blackline'), then click on 'Ball Closure Rings'

Oh bugger... I've just gone through that here, and it's working as I'd expect it to now... Bugger bugger bugger.
I've not changed anything... perhaps my computer just needed a restart... very odd indeed.

Any ideas how to change the layout of that error message, so I can maybe make it look a bit nicer?

Cheers.

[cdicken]

The error message will be in 'Design | Text' somewhere. You can do a search for it in there.