[development] The Drupal Diet - Making bootstrap faster

[Earl Miles]

Larry Garfield wrote:
> On Fri, 04 May 2007 11:15:12 -0700, Earl Miles <merlin at logrus.com> wrote:
>> Larry Garfield wrote:
>>> 1) Forms that are used as a page handler, if factored out to separate
>> files,
>>> may never be called from drupal_execute().  I do not consider this
>>> acceptable.
>> This doesn't follow. If I put my form in foo.pages.inc and use
>> drupal_get_form
>> as the callback, and provide my include so that my foo.pages.inc is loaded
>> when
>> that menu is hit, my form will be there. This, of course, isn't true if
>> this
>> form is also available in a non-page-context, which can happen, but in
>> that
>> case the form should be embedded into the .module anyway.
> 
> drupal_execute() is a non-page context.  

So is almost every other API call.

> Take for example node_type_form, the form function for which is node_form.
> It's a non-settings-page form that is used as a parameter to a callback on
> drupal_get_form, and is rarely used but reasonably large so it's a great
> candidate for factoring out of the main node.module file.

Sure, by itself it is. But node_form is, in core Drupal. only used via node_add 
and node_edit. Factor those out into their own pages. node forms, however, are 
a bad example because they are part of a fairly complex specialized hook system 
which isn't going to be addressed well by just this patch.

> If we factor it out into a pages include file for the node module, then it
> gets loaded when a user visits admin/content/types/page. Great.
> 
> What happens, though, if someone calls drupal_execute('node_type_form',
> ...)?
> How does the system know where to find that form and how to load it if
> drupal_execute() doesn't have some knowledge of where forms live? Either
> drupal_get_form() and drupal_execute() have to be able to dynamically load the
> form or that form now becomes inaccessible except through the page handler.

Well. To be honest I've been pretty against a lot of the uses of drupal_execute 
that everyone is so fond of, because it's tying the form to the object which I 
*hate*, strongly, and I simply don't understand why everyone loves it, beyond 
getting to cheat a little on validation. So I'm not really *for* this kind of 
thing; IMO if you're going to use drupal_execute('node_type_form') you should 
probably have to call an include prior to using it, or node.module includes an 
API that does that so the user doesn't have to.