Eric's Drupal Blog | a place to share Drupal coding experiences - theming, module development, jQuery, Linux shell scripts

Here's an tutorial explaining how to merge a subversion branch back into trunk:

If you need to merge some changes made to trunk into your branch, you could do the following:

In this tutorial I'll show how you can setup a server to parse email with a PHP script. This tutorial assumes that your server is configured to receive email (I wrote this using a virtual machine running postfix).

The first thing you'll need to do is configure an alias to direct email to a PHP script (instead of an email box). I added the following entry to the bottom of my /etc/aliases file and then ran the "newaliases" command to refresh my aliases database:

The above entry will pipe email sent to phpscript@MYDOMAIN to the designated PHP script.

And here's the script:

At this point in the code, the body of the message will be contained in the $body variable and the headers will be in $headers.

Here is an example of the parsed headers (using print_r()):

Now, you have all the email headers and message body parsed. You can do whatever your heart desires with the data, like insert it into a database or even create nodes!

In this code snippet, I'll show how you can parse a (large) CSV file using Drupal's Batch API. The purpose of batching an operation is to avoid PHP memory limits and time outs. Before you begin, I recommend reviewing the following two articles. Be sure to review the additional batch parameters outlined in the documentation, you might need to use them.

Batch API
Batch Operations

We can start by defining the arguments that will be passed into the batch_set() function. For this example, I added this code in an arbitrary page callback function.

Next, we'll define the batch callback function. This function will be called repeatedly until the $context['finished'] variable is set to "1".

The batch operation will be called until the end of the CSV file is reached. The $context variable is passed by reference into the batch callback so you can maintain data through each iteration; in this case, the position of the file pointer. When the batch operation is complete, the user will be redirected to the batch_process() path argument.

It's important to read the full Batch API documentation so you can take advantage of its additional features: finished callback, init_message, progress_message, error_message, etc.

In this snippet, I'll show you how you can submit a webform programmatically using drupal_execute(). The first thing you'll need to do is figure out what the $form_state data looks like when the webform is submitted, so you can recreate that structure and pass it into drupal_execute().

One way to accomplish this is to add a validation/submit handler to the form using hook_form_alter() and then output the contents of the submitted data (using krumo, print_r, etc).

The following code will prepend a validation handler to the webform $form, so we can dump the submitted data to the screen:

And here is the validation handler which will dump the submitted data to the screen. NOTE: krumo() is available from the devel module; you could use print_r() as well:

Now, if I populate the webform with some data:

And submit the form, I will get the following debug output:

You'll need to mirror the structure of the submitted data when creating your $form_state variable, which will be passed into drupal_execute().

In the following function, I show how you can submit a webform programmatically. There is even additional code in there which loads a user's previously submitted data, if you care.

In this tutorial I'll show how you can programmatically and dynamically remove a column from your view. In my example, I chose to hide an email column from unauthenticated users, but you could apply this code to do pretty much anything.

To get things started, I defined a content type of "Profile" to contain some user details (using the Content Profile module) and used the Devel module's generate users and nodes functionality to create some sample data. I then created a view to show the data:

Here is my page view display:

Now you can add the hook_views_pre_build() function in your module. Since the $view object is large, I recommend using krumo() (which comes with the Devel module) to browse through the $view object's properties.

The above code will neatly format the $view object in a hierarchical display. You can click to expand each class property.

As you can see, the $view object has a lot of data in it. At this point, you'll need to get acquainted with the structure of the handler object of the view ($view->display['default']->handler) and determine what to modify. To remove the email column for unauthenticated users, you can add the following code:

When I logout, my view no longer shows the email column: