How do I refresh page and keep a dropdown menu open

JavaScript
1

Hi,

I’m trying to achieve a notification feature which you see on facebook, myspace and so on.

Here the trick that I use:
I’ve pulled a number of data that a user has not been read (where active =‘0’) from a database to display on a notification icon on the menubar – the exact notification icon you will see on facebook and myspace – says 2 unread messages in bright red.

As the user click on the notification button to open up a dropdown menu and read their unread messages I process the script and update the active = ‘0’ to active = ‘1’ and refresh the page.

The problem is when the page is refreshed, the dropdown menu and the notification both disappeared.

How do I remove only that number in red and keep the dropdown menu open, I know that both facebook and myspace didn’t even refresh a page.

In this case, I don’t even know whether I use javascript or ajax. I’ve stolen (borrowed) the feature from twitter.

Hope I explain what I’m trying to do clearly and thanks for your help

2

it sounds like you are going to have to use ajax, so you won’t need to have the page refreshed,
and javascript should offer a solution to the dropdown menu problem,
or maybe instead of using a dropdown menu you could try and build a similar control using a div as your container.