forms api

This is just an idea.

We've built sites on Mambo/Joomla in the past. mosforms, an extension to build and output custom forms and store the input much like CCK works for Drupal, was yet a simple, but great component to design site contact and other forms for Joomla. mosforms has evolved and is available as Fabrik - Joomla Application Builder now. There is nothing that might compete with our CCK here, but the last line of the published roadmap for Fabrik sounds quite interesting to me:

I have been having some really exciting ideas about getting the formAPI to generate the bindings to the javascript. I realized that all the javascript I wrote for the tutorial module could be generalized. Then with a bit of glue code, all of the parameters needed to do the event binding could be put in a properties set on the form element. This way Drupal coders could create modules with sophisticated AHAH effects without needing to write any Javascript at all. Here is an example of a button declaration with all of the info needed to do a incremental page update:

Hello views aficionados. If anyone has the time, could you review the module posted in

http://drupal.org/node/103171

It's a module (that I will recode as a patch to views itself, eventually) that provides views within forms. These views can be used to select nodes. It includes exposed filters and a pager, and it generally behaves exactly the same as any other view would.

The module even includes a test harness where you can click a few buttons and test the new form element with any view on your website.

This is not production code, but I wanted to alert people early. Please do review this module and let us know what you think. It's a lot of code, and may require some changes to the underlying views implementation, so the more people who try it, break it, and suggest changes the better. Also, you can use this to start testing with your own modules.

After a lot of fine work on Avi's part, his formbuilder.module is ready for testing.

The code is in Drupal CVS but needs separate downloading because it includes two external open source but non-GPL libraries: jQuery and PEAR's JSON package.

I've put the latest version for temporary download here.

To test:

1. Install and enable the module.
2. Optional--change settings of your sidebar blocks so they don't display at admin/formbuilder. The UI is wide and otherwise, depending on your screen size/resolution, it may not fit.

OK, for the past few weeks i have been reading around different area's such as the form api, _cron hooks etc.
At times i could see what was happening and other times... i was totally lost.

For example for the past week or so i have been working on updating schedule module to work with 4.7.
So far i have built most of the form (god, how i wish i knew about lullabots formupdater before i began this ;P)
but i have been stuck on one single issue form_set_value() (http://api.drupal.org/api/head/function/form_set_value && http://drupal.org/node/51104 ) which allows for setting values to the form elements during the _validation stage.