How to get data from a dropdown box?

I want the user to select which table they want to see and then filter the data of the table and show that table; however, I need to manually get data from the dropdown box from my page code.

there is plenty of samples if you do a search for dropdowns. You need to hook up to the event change of the dropbox and there you can get the value and then filter the connected dataset using setFilter on your dataset. Makes sense?