Exercise: Declaring a Variable

  To declare a variable and assign the drop-down selection:

  1. Toggle to Design mode, open the Script Editor on drp_Territory.

  2. Type var Selection= at the beginning of the first line of the existing script.

    var Selection=drp_Territory.Item(drp_Territory.SelectedIndex);

    This declares a new variable Selection, and assigns the user’s selection to it.

  3. Replace the argument for Alert with the variable Selection.

    var Selection=drp_Territory.Item(drp_Territory.SelectedIndex);
Alert(Selection)

  4. Click OK to save the script and close the Script Editor.

  5. Test the script by toggling to Run mode and selecting an item from the drop-down box.

    An alert containing the name of the selected item should is displayed.

If the alert displays “undefined”, the alert argument has not been assigned a value. This is most likely a typo: If the variable is defined with a capital “S” for Selection, the variable in the alert argument must also have a capital “S”.

The exercises in this section used JavaScript and the Intelligence Client object model to access a user’s selection in a drop-down box. The Item method, with SelectedIndex as the argument can be acted on directly, or a variable can hold the selection, clarifying the JavaScript logic: get the selection, act on it.