These are optional. You can choose to have dynamic dropdown menus on your generated pages.
For example: You are designing an input form and you need users to specify
which state they are from.
Your current table, employees, holds the personnel information and you want
to let the user choose from a list of all of the states. So you link to another
table, thestates that you've already set up to contain the
state abbreviations (which are what you actually want stored in your employees
table) and their longer state names which are what you want displayed in the
list that the dropdown box will display.
First select which field you'd like to appear as drop down list on the generated
pages.
A list of tables in your database will appear. Choose the table containing
the data you'd like to appear in your drop down box.
Continuing with the example from above, you would choose thestates,
the table containing the names of each each state, and their abbreviations.
Choose the name of the field in the "linked" table you specified
above that contains the data you actually want to be stored in your table. In
the case of our example, this would be the state abbreviation
since you only want the state abbreviations stored in the employees table.
Choose the name of the field in the "linked" table you specified above that contains the data you want displayed in the list the dropdown box displays for the user to choose from. In the case of our example, this would be the statename.
Finally the "ADD DROP DOWN" button appears.
At this time because you have supplied all the information required to add a
drop down field, click this button to indicate that you'd like your field to
be of the drop down list type and that you'd like the data to be pulled from
the field and table you've chosen.
In the example you were generating pages for the employees
table, you chose to make the mystate field be of type dropdown,
you indicated it should pull its data from a table called thestates,
that the actual data you want stored to come from the abbreviation
field and that the data you want displayed to the user to come from the statename
field.
If you change your mind, you can make the field no longer of type drop down
list, by simply clicking on the appropriate line in the list of drop down fields.
The order in which you add these dropdown field specifications does not matter.