Thanks for the reply. I'm not really too concerned about html and how its displayed right now. I'm just concerned that its not passing the right data to the ajax call. It's also part of a much larger mvc type program so its hard to show html.
this is what the html for the drop down list looks like. It has some framework specific stuff in there. <select id="ddl_customer" name="ddl_customer[]" class="multiselect" multiple="multiple"> <php:label id="l_customer_dd"> </select> also in the javascript im setting ddl_customer to customer like the following. var customer = $('#ddl_customer'); also id I do the following.. the alert gives only selected values... which is what i want.... if i do the same thing in the ajax call i get the entire list. customer.change(function(){ cuslist = customer.val().join(", "); }); alert(cuslist);