Hi - this may be posted in the wrong place, and if so please forgive me.
I'm new to Visual Basic 2005 VSTO and I'm developing a small web app designed to read data from an access database linked to an excel worksheet. That portion works fine - I'm able to get the data (in whole) and bind to a GridView for display.
Next I coded to be able to create several drop-down boxes for selecting fewer rows to display in the GridView, and that works fine.
Now for the tricky part. I want to be able to select a value in one drop-down, and automatigically reduce the available values in the other drop downs to only those rows containing the selected value from the first dropdown - and that's where I'm getting stuck. Regardless of the final approach taken, I have to reduce the values in the drop-down to unique values only, because values repeat across many rows within the data. In recent attempts, my dropdowns were bound to specific queries in the database (e.g. Select [single column name] as single_column from query]. My problem is that since I'm only selecting distinct values for a single column, I don't have other columns (represented by other drop-downs) in order to do filtering on. My only option that I've found so far is to go back to the select statement and augment it with "Where" criteria for the other dropdowns selected text values. I know - this is a sloppy approach.
Has anyone come across anything like this in the past and found a clean way to approach this type of app. Essentially, the web-page should work much like the auto-filter processing done in an Excel worksheet - you select a value for one filtered column, and the others update to only show rows that meet the first selection, and so on. Can I expect any success by filling a dataset with the entire set of excel rows, and then somehow select distinct values from that dataset? Any examples of that out there?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Lost as a newbie.