#! code

Whilst creating a large and complex form in Drupal 6 recently I hit upon a problem that took me a couple of hours to solve so I am posting the solution here in case anyone else gets similarly stuck. I am also writing this down so that I can remember the strategy in case I have to do the same thing again.

Whilst creating a view for a Drupal site the other day I created an exposed form but rather than the usual select boxes that get displayed I needed them to be a list of check boxes. Whilst searching about on Google I eventually found this article, which kindly provides a function that will do this. Here is the function in full.

If you want to give your users a little snippet of code it is nice to give them the option of selecting the entire block of code without having to highlight the text manually. This can be done with a simple JavaScript button.

Take the following form:

This is a simple trick that will allow users to select the contents of a text area. First we need a text area.

A good usability feature of web forms is to fill the contents of one drop down menu, depending on what has been selected in a previous menu. This can be done quite easily with JavaScript.

Take the following form, in this instance I have used some server variables used in mod_rewrite, but the idea is valid.

Pinpointing where an error in a program is occurring is not always easy. This can be even more of a problem when you write an SQL query that produces an error. Take the following select statement, which is clearly wrong.

ELECT * FROM table;

I tend to do this at least every now and then, and don't usually spot it until it's too late. So when I then run mysql_query() on this statement nothing happens. As far as I can tell form the code the table contains no data.