#! code

A tabledrag form in Drupal 6 is any form that will allow you to move items up and down the list or into a hierarchy of items. This is actually a component of Drupal itself and is used on forms like menu, taxonomy and blocks management. Tabledrag is a great way of allowing your users to move items up and down a list with ease and they will be used to the mechanism from other areas of the site.

Essentially, a tabledrag is a normal HTML table within a form that contains some form elements and some JavaScript that will turn the table into a sortable group of elements.

As part of debugging a bit of code I needed to know the longest possible field lengths that a record contains. You might need to know this if you are performing a database migration. The following query returns a field, along with the length of the string, and orders the results by the number of characters in that string.

SELECT field, CHARACTER_LENGTH(field) as fieldCharacterCount FROM table ORDER BY fieldCharacterCount DESC

There are quite a few scripts available on the Internet that allow you to dump data from a database into a format that can be used to replicate that database structure elsewhere. The following function is my take on this commonly occurring script.

Filters are used in Drupal to change the content of the text of a node when it is viewed. The important thing to note is that Drupal filters should never alter the actual content of the node itself. Instead, when a node is saved it stores the output of the filter in the cache_filter table and displays this content the next time the node is viewed. This is useful because it doesn't mess about with the original text, and it speeds up the displaying of the node by running the filters once, rather than every time the node is loaded.

Apache can be set up to log all sorts of information. As of Apache 2.2 the basic log file format that a fresh install of Apache will produce will have the following format:

%h %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b

Which doesn't mean a lot to the uninitiated, so here is a short explanation of each.

Using server side scripts to search for things can be as complex or as simple as the situation requires. However, if you have a table of results and you just want to enable a simple JavaScript search on that table then this might be the script for you.

To search a table using JavaScript you need to split the table into bits, this can be done using the getElementsByTagName() function, which takes the name of the element that you want to capture. So to grab all of the rows of a table as an array you need to pass the value of tr.