from where to start the select option menu - html

Question

I've got a select option menu for example with 10 options. When I open the page I want it to be on the 5 element. Example
<select name="categories" id="news_cat">
<option value="0">Volvo</option>
<option value="1">Mercedes</option>
<option value="2">BMW</option>
<option value="3">Volga</option>
<option value="4">Lada</option>
<option value="5">Porsche</option>
</select>
When I open the page I see the first option Volvo,but I what to be for example BMW. If you are going to say to change their place, this is not the idea because I gave you a simple example. In my case the idea is other
I also forget to say that "selected" can't help because I read all of the values from database
<select name="categories" id="news_cat" selected="1">
<option value="0"></option>
{foreach from=$categories item=i}
<option value="{$i.id}"> {$i.name|stripslashes} </option>
{/foreach}
</select>

Answer 1

You need to apply selected or selected="selected" to your chosen element.
so with your example:
<select name="categories" id="news_cat">
<option value="0">Volvo</option>
<option value="1">Mercedes</option>
<option value="2">BMW</option>
<option value="3">Volga</option>
<option value="4" selected>Lada</option>
<option value="5">Porsche</option>
</select>

Answer 2

Add selected or selected='selected' to option
<select name="categories" id="news_cat">
<option value="0">Volvo</option>
<option value="1">Mercedes</option>
<option value="2">BMW</option>
<option value="3" selected>Volga</option>
<option value="4">Lada</option>
<option value="5">Porsche</option>
</select>

Answer 3

JavaScript solution: selectObj.options[2].selected=true;
http://jsfiddle.net/8dWzB/16/

Answer 4

No sure what server side technology you are using , but regardles of that, you can do what you like on the client side using JQuery. Try the following:-
1) Get the data from your database into a list of objects having the id and name of the each car. Something like the following:-
`var categorylist = [{"id":"1","name":"volvo"},{"id":"2","name":"Mercerdes"},{"id":"3","name":"BMW"},{"id":"4","name":"Kia"},{"id":"5","name":"Toyota"},{"id":"6","name":"Honda"},{"id":"7","name":"Seat"},{"id":"8","name":"Nissan"}];'
You can then get this list to the client-side using ajax post or get
2) Then you can iterate through the object like this
$.each(categorylist, function (index, car) {
if(car.id !='5') {
$("#news_cat").append('<option value="' + car.id + '">' + car.name + '</option>');
}else
{
$("#news_cat").append('<option selected=selected value="' + car.id + '">' + car.name + '</option>');
}
});
Have a look at this fiddle