title: How to create referential select dropdown in Joomla 2.5 Administrator Edit Menu Item page?
body: <p>I made a custom component in Joomla 2.5, and I need to reference custom tables to form a select dropdown in the "Menu Manager: Edit Menu Item" page.</p>
  
  <p>I know that the default.xml in the component view is where the fields should reside.</p>
  
  <p>Joomla uses this XML across many of their components to grab categories from the DB:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;field name="id" type="category"
                 description="JGLOBAL_CHOOSE_CATEGORY_DESC"
                 extension="com_content"
                 label="JGLOBAL_CHOOSE_CATEGORY_LABEL"
                 required="true"
                  /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And what appears is the first label/field below.  What I want to do is grab information from the DB to populate a second dropdown (carousels). </p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/nDI0z.png" alt="Joomla uses a category sitewide to grab the categories from the DB, but how to do a custom one?"></p>
  
  <p>How can I create my own logic to have my "Choose a carousel" field grab information from a table in the DB?</p>