Dropdowns and JavaScript - Puzzler??

Hi All,

(I'm currently dealing with OSS on this but I thought I would check here as well to see if anyone has any ideas.)

Here's an outline of the scenario I'm developing:

I have a "launch pad" template that basically includes some buttons to launch different templates/queries in separate browser windows.

These launched templates include a couple of dropdowns to filter on the data.

The users didn't want the (All) description as a default but something more informative. So I followed the instructions in OSS note 597042 to change it as below:.

.....

if (document.DDOWNBOX_1.FILTER_VALUE_1.options[0].value=="!ALL"){document.DDOWNBOX_1.FILTER_VALUE_1.options[0].text='Select a value';}

....

This works fine the first time a browser is launched but it fails each subsequent time (ie. the description goes back to "All"). Looking at the source of the web page I can see that the dropdown object is being incremented each time... (i.e. <form id="_1" method="POST" name="DDOWNBOX_1").... DDOWNBOX_1 becomes DDOWNBOX_2 then DDOWNBOX_3 and so on.

I did some more searching on OSS and found that by toggling the NO_SESSION_COOKIE on in the templates this problem went away. Or so I thought....

During development I had hardcoded the URL's behind the buttons to launch the browsers. Now I am trying to use JavaScript to generate the URLs so that it will work in all environments (DEV, QA and PRD). To do this I am using the SAP_BW_URL_Get() function. When I do this the problem reappears. From what I can tell, the function itself returns a bunch of characters (session ID??) and the begining of the command parameter string.

To make a long story short:

Has anyone else experienced this?

Does anyone know of a way to retrieve the app server and port number through JavaScript so that I can build my own URL instead of using SAP_BW_URL_Get() or <SAP_BW_URL>?

Cheers,

John