Initialization

This article gives you detailed instructions on how to create dhtmlxCombo on a page. Follow the steps below:

Download the dhtmlxComboBox package and unpack it into a folder of your project
Include source files
Create a container
Initialize ComboBox with the object constructor
Load data into ComboBox

myCombobox.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>How to Start with dhtmlxComboBox</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/codebase/suite.css">
        <script type="text/javascript" src="/codebase/suite.js"></script>
   </head>
   <body>
        <div id="combo_container"></div>
        <script>            var combo = new dhx.Combobox("combo_container", {// configuration});
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

Include source files

Create an HTML file and place full paths to JS and CSS files of the dhtmlxSuite library into the header of the file. The files are:

suite.js
suite.css

<script type="text/javascript" src="../../codebase/suite.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../../codebase/suite.css">

Create a container

Add a container for ComboBox and give it an id, for example "combo_container":

index.html

<div id="combo_container"></div>

Initialize ComboBox

To initialize dhtmlxComboBox, you should use the dhx.Combobox constructor. The constructor function takes two parameters:

a container to place a Combo Box into. The one we have created at the previous step.
an object with configuration properties. See the full list below.

var combo = new dhx.Combobox("combo_container", {// config options});

Configuration properties

css	adds style classes for the component
data	specifies an array of data objects to set into the combobox
disabled	makes ComboBox disabled
filter	sets a custom function for filtering ComboBox options
helpMessage	adds an icon with a question mark next to the Combo input
hiddenLabel	adds a hidden label for a ComboBox input that will be used while sending a form to the server
itemHeight	sets the height of a cell in the list of options
itemsCount	shows the total number of selected options
label	adds a label for ComboBox
labelPosition	defines the position of a label of a combobox: "left"\|"top"
labelWidth	sets the width of a label
listHeight	sets the height of the list of options
multiselection	enables selection of multiple options in ComboBox
placeholder	sets a placeholder in the input of ComboBox
readOnly	makes ComboBox readonly (it is only possible to select options from the list, without entering words in the input)
selectAllButton	defines whether the Select All button should be shown
template	sets a template of displaying options in the popup list
value	specifies the values that will appear in the input on initialization of the combobox
virtual	enables dynamic loading of data on scrolling the list of options

See the detailed description of Combo configuration options in the Configuration article.

Load data into ComboBox

There are two handy ways of loading data, i.e. a set of options into ComboBox:

from an external file with the help of the load method of Data collection:

var combo = new dhx.Combobox("combo_container");
combo.data.load("../common/dataset.json");

from a local source using the parse method of Data collection:

var countries = [
    {
        value: "Austria",
        src: "../common/flags/at.png"
    },
    {
        value: "Belgium",
        src: "../common/flags/be.png"
    },
    {
        value: "Bulgaria",
        src: "../common/flags/bg.png"
    },
    {
        value: "Cyprus",
        src: "../common/flags/cy.png"
    }
]
 
var combo = new dhx.Combobox("combo_container");
combo.data.parse(countries);

Detailed information on loading data into ComboBox is given in the article Data Loading.