Q:

XPages: DropDown selection of documents

I have a VERY general question and am not 100% sure if I am just being lazy or what, I just cannot seem to get a handle on where to start :o)
I am new to XPages programming and have created an application that works well enough, the problem is that I would like to UI to be totally different to what I have. I find that my implementation is much too "Notes like" and not "Web like" enough. OK, enough whining - I have a document that contains a county, a province, a city and some text to that particular city. Currently I display a view (XPage) listing all documents by county / province / city. The user then selects the city document which is then opened to display the text. Works well enough. As you can see very "Notes like". What I would like is this: The user sees 3 drop down fields (two of which cannot be selected), s/he then selects the country from the drop down. The province field now becomes active only displaying the provinces for that Country. S/he selects the province and all the cities are now is the next drop down - once you select the city the text is displayed below the city name. Quite simple I thought - now matter what I do I cannot get this to work :o(
Any pointers (maybe an example app somewhere?).
Thanks in advance
Greetings
Ursus

A:

First thing you should do is get a copy of the Mastering XPages book and read through that. Then you should look at how rendering and partial refreshes will help you do what you want. 
You are going to want to set the rendering to false until you enter some value in the previous field. Then, in the event, you determine if the value is valid and set a flag (could be a simple viewScope) and do a partial refresh of the next field. In that field's properties, you check the viewScope flag that you just set in the previous field and if it is correct, you reset the rendering to true to show the field.

