Content tagged with: field

This article will show you how to establish parent and child relationships between nodes. To start, you'll need to install and enable the CCK module, and node reference (which comes with CCK). Next, you'll need to create two node types (admin/content/types/add). For my example, I created two node types: Organization (parent) and Department (child), both consisting of a title and body (of course, you can add as many fields as you'd like).

Next, you'll want to add a new field to the parent node (organization) by editing the content type (admin/content/node-type/organization) and clicking on the "Manage fields" tab. Enter the information to add a new reference field on this screen. Add a label (ex: "Department Reference"), enter a field name (ex: field_ref_department), choose "Node reference" as the field type, and choose "Autocomplete text field" as the form element as shown below.

On the next screen you can choose the field options. For this example, I changed "Number of values" to "Unlimited" (to allow a one to many relationship), selected "Department" in the list of content types that can be referenced, and saved these settings.

Now, if you create a new parent node (Organization: node/add/organization), you'll have the option of adding pre-existing child (Department) nodes. As you start typing the title of the child nodes in the node reference auto-complete field, it will automatically populate the field with nodes that match. Of course this will only work if you have already created child nodes. At this point adding relationships is a two step process.

To improve usability, you can install the Popups API (http://drupal.org/project/popups) and Add and Reference (http://drupal.org/project/popups_reference) modules which allow you to add child nodes without leaving the node/add/PARENT-NODE screen. After installing and configuring these modules, you'll be able to add child nodes directly from the node/add/PARENT-NODE screen by clicking on the "Add new: Add Child Node link", which spawns a lightbox window to add a child node.

Here is a screenshot of a parent node view after adding child relationships:

In this tutorial I'll show how I used the Forms API to add a file upload field and attach the uploaded file in an email. I have experience using the PEAR libraries Mail and Mail_MIME to handle MIME/HTML emails and file attachments, so I decided to use them.

If you are unfamiliar with PEAR, here are a few quick tips:

Now we can create our form callback function. NOTE: I'm keeping this form as simple as possible to focus on the file attachment functionality.

The above will create a basic form object with a file upload file and a submit button. The form can be included using the drupal_get_form function. Example:

Next I added a validation function to validate the file upload.

The above validation form will check to see if a file has been uploaded and set a form error as necessary. The last line of the function sets information about the successfully uploaded file to the $form_state array, which will then be passed to the submit handler function.

Next I created a form submit handler function which will create a Mail_Mime object, attach the file, send the email, and set a drupal message for the user to see.

If everything worked correctly, the form will be validated, submitted, and an email with the file attachment will be sent.

Unfortunately, the stock Drupal contact module does not satisfy everyone's functional requirements. I decided to weigh alternative solutions, but since all I wanted to do was add an additional field to the form and email, I decided to add a few lines of module code instead. This solution consists of adding a form_alter hook to modify the contact form and submit handler, and an additional submit handler function:

Now, if I browse to the contact form, there is a new field (phone number in this example) inserted right above the message textarea. When I submit the form, the email sent contains the phone number as well.

Hardcoding something in your module or theme can be just as bad as hacking the core. If the Drupal admin interface allows you the change and configure something, your modules and themes must be scalable enough to account for these changes. This code snippet (example) shows you how you can lookup the CCK field labels, so you'll never have to hard code a label in your theme/module again.

Drupal 6 comes with greatly improved usability, such as the ability to reposition node form elements by dragging and dropping (unlike Drupal 5, which made you assign a numeric weight to each item). But what about the form elements that Drupal does not let you adjust, like the revision information? You can implement a form_alter hook to solve this one...