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.

At some point you might want add validation to the user edit form to ensure username is a valid email address. You can accomplish this by adding a form_alter hook, testing for the user profile form, and adding a validation handler to the $form object.

A recent task that came my way way to create the functionality to capture email addresses using a simple subscription form. Since email is not a reliable means of capturing data, I used CCK to create nodes to capture the data and a view to show the results. First, I create a CCK node type called "email_subscription" which did not have a body or any custom fields, just the title for email address. I then created a view that shows the nodes in a table. Here's the module I created that generates a block module that contains the CCK node form. The block uses the CCK node form to capture the data. When the node is created, it uses the nodeapi hook to send a conformation email. There is also a function to validate the user's email address.

Recently I've been struggling with creating a multi-step CCK node form in Drupal 5. I was able to implement a solution that used a combination of form_alter and jQuery, but due to the amount of jQuery, it was too slow. I then attempted the same functionality in Drupal 6, but due to the number of changes in the Forms API, I decided to take a step back. Here's my first successful attempt at creating a multi-step form using a Drupal 6 module and the Forms API. The following code adds the ability to jump to any step of the form, save at any point, and dynamically creates steps based on the number of fieldsets. My next step will be transposing this code to work with a CCK node form.

Screenshot:

Here is a quick code snippet that enables you to add your own custom validation to a CCK node type form.