Best way to communicate data.

[Korialstrasza]

I have an situation that I don't know how exactly to display this data.

I need to display lists of posts made by users. These posts have about 25 fields each, stored in SQL.

I don't want to show all 25 fields at once for each post. Instead, I want to show just the basics of the post (date, title, etc) and then if the viewer is interested, he could then click the post and see an expanded view of that post revealing the 25 additional form fields.

I'd like this to be pretty dynamic in that when the viewer clicks the post, he isn't forwarded to another page with the details. Instead, he clicks the post and then the post itself expands, revealing the details.

Here's an example I whipped up:
http://cifncs.org/games_wanted/example.php (cick the boxes)

I could do that, and throw around innerHTML variables and replace stuff here and there, but that seems very inefficient. Some ideas that came to my mind were:
1. expanding the Div, saving the innerHTML and reloading when they click out
2. creating and appending div to the "basic info" div
3. displaying in table rows, and expanding the rows when they click it

You guys got any ideas?
Thanks for the input

 

[jmackay]

Well if you don't want to pull all of the posts out in the initial database query, then you will probably be looking at AJAX to load the info when they click on the box / title / whatever.

There are a few ways to show/hide info, just depends on how you want it laid out really.

Here are a few examples, he does some really good CSS / JS work

http://www.stunicholls.com/various/more.html
http://www.stunicholls.com/various/more_again.html
http://www.stunicholls.com/various/more_and_more.html

 

[Korialstrasza]

Exactly what I'm looking for, thanks!