jquery - get the value of a selected option in a select input

Question

I'm quite a newbie when it comes to jquery. I'm using cakePHP and I have a form to register orders for a selected user, the select input for selecting the user looks like this in cakePHP:

echo $this->Form->input('user_id');

and that renders a form with an input like this:

<label for="OrderUserId">User</label>
<select name="data[Order][user_id]" id="OrderUserId">
    <option value="2"> User 2</option>
    <option value="3"> User 3</option>
</select>

I want to do an ajax call so that, when a user is selected, his info appears in a div. So far, I have this javascript:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#OrderUserId").change(function() {
        $.ajax({
            url: 'users/getData' //here would go the user ID
        });
    });
});

My question is this: how can I get the value of the selected option with jQuery so that I can pass it to the url in the ajax method?

Answer 1

Just use plain js this.value . this inside your callback represents the dom element so you would just access its value using .value .

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#OrderUserId").change(function() {
         //var user = this.value;
        $.ajax({
            url: 'users/getData/' + this.value //here would go the user ID
        });
    });
});

Fiddle

Answer 2

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#OrderUserId").change(function() {
        var _this=$(this);
        $.ajax({
            url: 'users/getData'+_this.val(); //here would go the user ID
        });
    });
});