Grayside.Org - prepopulate

Node Form Dominos via Node Reference and Prepopulate

grayside — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:47:04 +0000

I like Prepopulate. I like to have that pseudo-RESTful way of preloading a form to minimize the amount of work a user has to do to get to the point of submitting a form. But I also like clean URLs. This post reviews in detail a technique to use a single prepopulated nodereference field to prepopulate a bunch of other fields based on that reference. Since Prepopulate’s recent 2.0 release, it because a whole lot more difficult to use the Form API to work magic on what it provides.

I use this in conjunction with nodereference to tailor node forms for their relationship with the referenced node.

Prepopulate Group Audience

grayside — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 17:28:16 +0000

This trick does not use the very fine Prepopulate module at all.

By appending ?gids[]=<group nid> to your node/add URL, you can specify the group audience. By throwing in a comma-delimited list of nids, you can specify multiple audiences. It’s just that simple.

Overriding Prepopulate: Do Not Use hook_form_FORM_ID_alter

grayside — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:31:30 +0000

EDIT: As of Prepopulate 2.0, you cannot directly use hook_form_alter() anyway. See Node Form Dominos to learn about using #after_build to work with Prepopulated values. — 2010/09/09

The Prepopulate module works some great magic to preload forms from URL variables. But suppose you need some extra magic to modify the titles it puts in place?

You can always use hook_form_alter (and here is one of countless little tutorials on that).

If you already know about that, you might be someone that enjoys the use of hook_form_FORM_ID_alter(). If you do, you cannot use it to override Prepopulate-set fields. It turns out that regardless of module weight, hook_form_FORM_ID_alter is called before hook_form_alter for any given form, meaning that the more specific function will always set the value, then Prepopulate will come along and reset it to your URL value.

There is a nice issue (#300481) that details this problem, and hopefully will find itself fixed in Drupal 8.

Prepopulating Casetracker

grayside — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:32:41 +0000

The Prepopulate module for Drupal is a nifty little tool that resets the default values of forms on their way to the browser. This is particularly useful for crafting links to create nodes with pre-set values. You can even prepopulate Case Tracker form values to help users create cases filled out as you would like.