Foxpro combobox binding from database

Question

I have Form1. I have table "Category", now I want to display all CategoryName in to combobox cbbCategory in Form1, the category names data are retrieved from Category table, how can I do this?

Answer 1

There are several ways you can do this, from querying the table into an array, writing as a SQL query, etc and setting up the properties.

What I would suggest for a start is this. Open your form.
Right-click anywhere in the form and pick "Data Environment". If the category table is NOT already shown in the window, right-click and select Add. It will prompt you to pick a table and select your category table. Then close the data environment.

Now, put a combobox on your form if you have not done so already. Right-click on the combobox and click "Builder". It will walk you through the selection process to get what you want. Start with picking the table... your category table. Then it has picker next to it to identify which column(s) you want to be displayed in the combobox. If your category table has both an ID and a description, I would pick your description FIRST, then the internal ID column second (so we can hide the second column if you dont want to actually show it).

Click on the second tab for "Style", and to clarify the difference between a "Drop-down Combo" vs "Drop-down List" is that a combo will default show you available choices, but if one is not available, allows a user to manually enter a new one which you might want to allow adding to your master category lookup table. "Drop-down List" is fixed to only allow the user to pick an entry from those available and nothing else.

Next, click on the Layout tab. This allows you to adjust the columns widths to see/hide what it will look like during drop-down mode (just stretch/shrink the columns)

Finally, the "Value" tab. It is asking for which column from those you selected to be available do you want to store behind-the-scenes. If an ID column, so be it... if the description, that's fine too. You can leave the last "Field Name" blank for now and it will just store whatever is selected into the comboboxes "Value" property... from which you can do whatever you need to in next phase of you app.