Drop Downs, Queries, Filters, oh my!

[Chip Gandy]

ok, here's what i have:
Oracle server which feeds 2 tables into a SQL Sever via SQL Server DTS.

My form is querying data from the SQL server.

I'd love to get the cascading drop downs to work with filters from SQL but
haven't had much luck there. it's similar to the example out there with cars
and models except that this data is coming from SQL instead of XML.

there's 4 drop downs, Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, and Product. each tier
drives the next and finally ending with the product. Since i'm having
problems with cascading drop downs, i have tier 1 and 2 as static and the
product is pulled from another datasource on a custom query. Then it fills
in tier 3 via rules. Ultimately... Once the product is selected, it
retrieves via filters, a manufacturer entry. The one that I'm now stuck on
is the version field. In many cases, the value for product will have 3 or
more versions with it. I'd like to have that one as a drop down which is
populated by the product selection. I've kinda seen how to make that work,
but what i can't find is how to get the sql data into an xml to use. Clear
as mud eh?

So, what are my options?

TIA.

 

[alex94040]

Chip, the fact that your data is coming from SQL should make no
difference - it should basically be a list of items presented as a
repeating group with a bunch of fields, either in the main data source
or in secondary data sources. And you should be able to apply the same
conditional formatting and filtering techniques here. Look at this
example:

http://blogstogo.com/dotnet2/archive/2004/12/13/544.aspx

Good luck,
Alex

 

[Chip Gandy]

Using that example doesn't help for duplication of data though. that's
another issue that I've run into in the past. I can get a filter to work
like well up to about the 3rd tier and then things go to hell in a
handbasket. There's about 6000 total rows in the database that I'm trying to
filter out and break down. So the first of 4 drop downs has 6 unique entries
but almost 6000 total rows. I'm also concerned with performance using so
many data connections. I've had it take upwards of 2 minuts in the past when
i was doing some deep nested stuff on multiple filters and figured tht there
just had to be a better way.

Thanks