HTML, PHP No data in drop down box

Question

Hey, I am trying to figure out why a website's drop down box will not show any options. The data file for this drop down box comes from a microsoft access .mde file. The file is present and after the last update was working fine. Some changes happened to the site, i.e. text got added along with some photos. Im not saying this was when the drop down box went bad, but when it was discovered these were the only changes made. The data file seems fine as it is worked with everyday. Can anyone point me in the right direction as to where to begin looking for the bug?

For a better idea of what I am talking about, check out the Site http://yogaalliance.org/teacher_search.cfm and try selecting a country.

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

<select name="srchCountry" tabindex="1" onchange="changeCountry(this.options[this.selectedIndex].value)">
<option value="none">Choose Country</option>
</select>

Post your code as there seems to be a problem with the script, not with the html.

Answer 2

I would look at the code that renders the dropdown and trace where it gets its data, put some print statements with comments along the way so that you can look at the html output and see if there is any data there

Answer 3

The right direction can be only one and it is called "debugging".
As it can be thousands of reasons, you have to trace your application yourself, step by step, checking all critical variables values, trying to spot the place where the things goes bad.
Error messages are great help too

Good article from IBM to start from: shttp://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-debug/

The main thing to understand is the code must be run to find the problem, not overlooked.

Answer 4

One possibility that's highly unlikely in a Cold Fusion file (I'm assuming the CFM extension means it's CF), and that's that the country table has had fields added to it, and the select is being populated from a SQL result set using ordinal references rather than field names, e.g., rs(0) instead of rs("Country"). If a new field was added in the table before the Country field, rs(0) would now return the first field instead of Country, which is now rs(1).

I would think it's extremely unlikely that this is the cause -- it's an explanation more likely to be applicable to 1999-era PHP code!