Getting the selected ID from a Dojo ComboBox

While fiddling around with the Dojo ComboBox widget today, I noticed that while it does support name-value pairs, it doesn’t provide an explicit way of getting back the “value”. For example, if you provide it with the JSON object:

[ {"Pat":1}, {"Mary":2}]

you can use the ComboBox’s getValue() function to retrieve the names “Pat” and “Mary”, but not the second value, which is generally what you really want.

So, FYI, to get the value, get a handle to the ComboBox, and retrieve it’s comboBoxSelectionValue.value attribute. For example, given a ComboBox with a widgetId of “myCombo”, use

var selectedId = dojo.widget.byId(’myCombo’).comboBoxSelectionValue.value;

Alternatively, and possibly simpler, you can set the setSelectedValue attribute on the div when you’re creating the ComboBox. For example, if I had a hidden input field that I wanted the selected id to be copied to:

<input type=”hidden” name=”userid” id=”userid”></input>

you would define the ComboBox like:

<div dojoType=”ComboBox”

setSelectedValue=”dojo.byId(’userid’).value=arguments[0]” …….(whatever other args you want)

> </div>

This results in the hidden input field being automatically populated with the selected id value. Simple enough, but it would be better if the ComboBox had a parameter where you could simply give it the id of an input node to mirror itself to.

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