[support] More effective use of auto-complete in Profile

[Jason Flatt]

On Wednesday March 7 2007 4:42 am, Neil: esl-lounge.com wrote:
> Thanks Gordon,
>
> would it thus be possible to use the hook_form_alter() to get the
> autocomplete to look in say location_towns BUT the value ultimately
> selected by the user is entered into the normal profile_values table? Just
> want to ensure I've understood that correctly.
>
> Scenario:
>
> User A goes to fill out profile "City" field. Types "Sa..." and the
> following values appear:
>
> San Antonio, Texas
> San Francisco, California (both present in our pre-populated location_towns
> table)
>
> User selects San Antonio, Texas but only the value "San Antonio" gets
> entered into the profile_values table. Is that possible?
>
> Neil
>

The short answer is yes.

The medium answer is that you probably also want to use hook_user() to help 
with this. In hook_form_alter(), query your database for the cities and 
states and use the results to fill your select field's #options array, using 
the city table's id as the array's key.

Then in hook_user, probably on the submit op, take the key for the item the 
user selected, do another database query on the city table and store that 
value in the profile field.

There are actually a couple of different ways you could go about this, 
depending on what you ultimately wanted to do. This should at least get you 
going in the right direction, and you can work out your details as you come 
to them.

http://api.drupal.org/api/5/function/hook_form_alter
http://api.drupal.org/api/5/function/hook_user
http://api.drupal.org/api/5/file/developer/topics/forms_api_reference.html#select
http://api.drupal.org/api/5/group/database

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Jason Flatt
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