Thread

Has any progress been made getting categories (checkboxes or selects) to show checked or highlighted in a stand alone edit form?

A wiki article mentions it didn’t work for the author and the follow-up discussions have some ideas that ultimately did not work either.

I don’t know how others are doing it, but here’s what’s worked for me… note that the following code was written to show just the parent categories (my edit form used categories perhaps a bit differently than most).  Still, it should be easy to modify to work in the general case.

<select name="category[]" id="main_category" size="1">
    <option value="">-- Select a Category --</option>
    {exp:query sql="SELECT
                        c.cat_id,
                        c.cat_name,
                        p.selected
                    FROM
                        exp_categories AS c LEFT JOIN
                        (
                            SELECT cat_id, 'selected' AS selected FROM exp_category_posts WHERE entry_id='{entry_id}'
                        ) AS p ON c.cat_id=p.cat_id
                    WHERE
                        c.parent_id='0' AND
                        c.group_id='3'
                    ORDER BY c.cat_order ASC;"}
        <option value="{cat_id}" {if selected == "selected"}selected="selected"{/if}>{cat_name}</option>
    {/exp:query}
</select>

After a quick test, this seems to be exactly what I need. Thanks Ender, that really helps.

no problem, glad it worked for you.

Thanks, it helped me out too

good to hear 😊

Great succinct how-to—thanks!

Hi ender,
        just to let you know… it helped me out too !!

glad this code has helped so many people.  makes me wonder how many people saw it and didn’t post 😊