[development] fixing nodeapi : programmatically submitting forms.

27 Jun 2006

      Hey everyone.

I don't have a lot of time for core development right now (I will  
likely only have time again in august, by the looks of things),
but we have a problem in core at the moment. I am talking of course  
of the fact that FAPI only partially replaced node api,
leaving neither of them the right solution for programmatically  
creating nodes and the like.

The solution I have in mind for this , is the following :

1 ) introduce a hook_forms. which registers each of the forms on the  
site.
2 ) register all the forms, and their inputs and create callbacks for  
them
3 ) put the form creation code into it's own function, with the  
registered callback
4) alter fapi to not use _POST at all. Instead use a parameter that  
is passed to it, which merely defaults to _POST.

Instead of PUSHING the form array through the form generation  
process, we now have the ability to PULL the form
array and process it.

So whenever you want to display a form, instead of having

function mymodule_page_callback() {

    $form['title'] = array(
        /*
          generate your form array here
       */
   );
   return drupal_get_form('form_id', $form, 'alternate');
}

You have :

function mymodule_forms() {
    $form['mymodule/form_id'] = array(
         'callback' => 'mymodule_form_id',
         'access' => user_access('can do form_id'),
         'title' => 'form title'
    );
}

function mymodule_form_id($input) {
    $form['title'] = array(
         /*
          generate your form array here
       */
   );
   return $form;
}

function mymodule_page_callback() {
   // get your form input ready
   return drupal_get_form('mymodule/form_id', array('input' =>  
'object'));
}

--
Adrian Rossouw
Drupal developer and Bryght Guy
http://drupal.org | http://bryght.com