Chained Select question

[Corby]

Greetings everyone.

I'm fresh out of school and have started my first job as a designer/developer and I've already found myself in a pickle in the first week of work.

My boss has asked me to take an Excel spreadsheet, basically a tree if you will, where column 1 has an option (pick a state), based on the state picked, there is a yes or no question for column 2....based upon that yes or no answer, column 3 has various questions...and so on.

Well at each level of this tree (left to right), a calculation is done to set an interest rate for clients of ours that borrow money. Some states will end in a flat rate, determined as early as the second tree node....other states we could end up going as deep as 7-8 fields.

My question is, using something similar to the Chained Select script found here (http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/chainedmenu/) I'd like to create this in a web site. My issue, so far, seems to be assigning a value carried through to each of the tree levels...a value modified each time by that particular node's selection, and then at the end of this tree, whether it be node 2 or node 8, displaying the interest rate.

Any ideas/suggestions would be great! Thank you all in advance for your assistance/tips.

-Corby-

[jscheuer1]

I'd say this can be done but, using javascript alone for something like this is not wise. A server side language such as PHP is better suited to a task like this that would be used by people with and without javascript enabled. Javascript can be added to most server side scripts to take as much load as possible off of the server for clients with javascript enabled. The project itself appears complex enough to merit the use of a server side script package tailored to this sort of thing. Customization will require either a user friendly interface for this 'package' or a good knowledge of coding in its particular language.