Auto fill data in form

[kdo]

Hi all,

I am working a project at the moment and I'm hoping to incorporate form tools as it looks like a great tool.

The system is a martial arts membership database, what I'm trying to do is;

- I have a list of members in a mysql db table
- I want to create a form (e.g. for a tournament/competition, grading etc.) with some fields such as Name, email address, date of birth of the member
- An instructor will login, select the member who's information should be pre-populated on the form, add some additional information and then submit it.

- How do I tell form tools to auto-populate the form with the members information?

(I've looked at option lists and these seem great, particularly loading data from another form, but I need to specify which member to load, not just giving the option of all of them?)

I'm a PHP developer, so I can handle writing some PHP/JS to load the data into the form dynamically, but any pointers on where in the form tools code or within a module to do this would be great.

Thanks
Keith

[kdo]

So, this is a bit of a hack, but I decided to make use of the default value functionality and extend it to allow reading from the database.



I found that the default values are read in ft_get_new_view_submission_defaults (in global/code/views.php)
I couldn't find a hook for this function, so had to modify it directly.

I am integrating this into another system, so I can push data into GET/POST variables and redirect the user to the add new submission page.
I can then use those variables to construct a SQL statement that will load the correct data.

So, in the default value for a field, I specify a string something like this:

SQL:SELECT name FROM member WHERE member.id = '{{member_id}}';

{{member_id}} is a placeholder to read the value from $_REQUEST, so in ft_get_new_view_submission_defaults, I check for the "SQL:" at the start of the string, if it's present, substitute the variables, execute the query and store the result back as the default value.


This is my new modified function;

PHP Code:

function ft_get_new_view_submission_defaults($view_id)
{
  global $g_table_prefix;

  $query = mysql_query("
    SELECT *
    FROM {$g_table_prefix}new_view_submission_defaults
    WHERE view_id = $view_id
    ORDER BY list_order
  ");

  $info = array();
  while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($query))
  {
        /*
        * Modification to allow an SQL query be specified as a source of default values
        * GET/POST variables are read for WHERE clause
        */
        // look for the "sql" string start
        if(strtolower(substr($row['default_value'],0, 4)) == "sql:"){
                $sql=substr($row['default_value'], 4);
                // do template variable replacement {{variable_name}} against REQUEST vars
                if (preg_match_all("/{{(.*?)}}/", $row['default_value'], $m)) {
                        foreach ($m[1] as $i => $varname) {
                        $sql = str_replace($m[0][$i], sprintf('%s', mysql_real_escape_string($_REQUEST[$varname])), $sql);
                        $row['default_value']=mysql_result(mysql_query($sql),0);
                        }
                }
        }
    $info[] = $row;
  }

  return $info;
}