Wednesday 25 July 2012

Form API and AJAX callbacks


Here's a piece of information that's well hidden.

If you're using Drupal's AJAX functionality with forms - but you don't actually want to change the form but instead do other stuff on the page, you may run into trouble because there's something that's not clearly explained about the AJAX callback function in your PHP code.

You know you can add this:

$form['tickbox'] = array(
  '#type' => 'checkbox',
  '#title' => t('Change something on the page'),
  '#ajax' => array(
    'wrapper' => 'id-of-some-div-on-the-page',
    'callback' => 'mymodule_form_ajax_callback',
  ),
);

And when you click the box your function in the PHP gets called:

function mymodule_form_ajax_callback($form, $form_state) {
  return '<div id="">Hello!</div>';
}

Okay that just does a straight replace. But what if you want to append it instead? The documentation says that this function can return AJAX commands instead. So I can do this, right?

function mymodule_form_ajax_callback($form, $form_state) {
  return ajax_command_append(NULL, 'Hello!');
}

Nope. The documentation says I can return an array of commands. So I can do this, right?

function mymodule_form_ajax_callback($form, $form_state) {
  return array(
    ajax_command_prepend(NULL, 'Hello!'),
    ajax_command_append(NULL, 'Goodbye!'),
  );
}

Nope.

The answer is hidden around line 219 of includes/ajax.inc, this will work:

function mymodule_form_ajax_callback($form, $form_state) {
  return array(
    '#type' => 'ajax',
    '#commands => array(
      ajax_command_prepend(NULL, 'Hello!'),
      ajax_command_append(NULL, 'Goodbye!'),
    ),
  );
}

It needs to be a renderable array so this is what works.

Sunday 22 July 2012

jQuery publish/subscribe custom events

There seems to be a stuck idea with respect to jQuery which demands binding custom events and their functions to a specific DOM object (like 'document' or 'body') and triggering the event on that object which then tells whatever objects might want to know about the event using another event.


There's an example of this here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/399867/custom-events-in-jquery and another here http://jamiethompson.co.uk/web/2008/06/17/publish-subscribe-with-jquery/ (okay, that's four years ago but it's top of the Google results on this subject).


I may be being stupid (it's been known) but that seems a completely unnecessary step - possibly inherited from OOP coding in a non-HTML environment where it may be necessary to have two stages.


So, here I am building a new carousel system for Drupal 7 - not because I'm a glutton for punishment but because none of the existing options does what I need for my current contract - and come up against this issue and something is nagging me. I've been here before.


If you imagine, a modern carousel has its little indicator buttons to show which slide we're currently on and allow the user to select a slide to view with a click. It also has forward and back arrows (which may be hidden or displayed if there's a slide to go forward or back to). And there may be an auto-change option if the user isn't selecting slides manually.


Now each of those indicators, arrows and auto-scroll items is an object which has behaviours attached. Let's call them carousel "tools". And they need to know what's going on.


Let's say the last indicator is clicked by the user, the system must scroll to the last item and then a check must be made to see if the "next" arrow should be hidden, the old indicator unhighlighted, the new indicator highlighted and the auto-scroll switched off (maybe with another timer started so the auto-scroll restarts after a period of time of user inactivity).


Or, if it's the auto-scroll in action, similar actions must be taken when a new slide is displayed.


Now you could hard-code all this into the slide function but we all know that's naughty tight coupling and will be difficult to write without lots of bugs and to maintain for anyone else. Since each object has its own behaviours this problem is ripe for proper OOP implementation.


So we could encapsulate the tools and then keep a list of those tools and hard-code a function to call in each one of them when the slide changes. Okay, that's better functionality, looser coupling but it can be done better.


Instead what we intuitively want to do is send a custom event saying "this carousel has changed its slide" to every object that needs to know (and don't forget we might have more than one carousel on a page so we also need to distinguish between the tools belonging to each carousel).


Okay, so we could bind a function for the "slideChange" event to the root carousel DOM element and then have that element triggered by the slideChange function (with data including the old and new slide IDs, plus whether this is the first slide or the last slide in the list - so that the previous/next arrows know whether to hide themselves).


But why do we have to use the root carousel element at all?


We don't. What about this:


$('.carousel-tool').trigger('slideChange.' + myCarouselID, {...slide change data...});


And in the set-up for each tool we can have this:


$(this).bind('slideChange. + myCarouselID, function(e, data) {
  var me = $(this);
  ... process the slideChange event
});


And in the HTML every tool has a "carousel-tool" class. If we do this we are completely encapsulating the actions of the tools. The slideChange function can reference every tool, without actually having to know who they are.


This uses the custom event namespacing feature available in jQuery to ensure that only the tools that belong to a specific carousel have the event triggered when that carousel slide changes. You could namespace the HTML class but that's less efficient in some respects.


Or you could modify the trigger line:


$('#' + myCarouselID).find('.carousel-tool').trigger('slideChange', {...slide change data...});


Actually this is probably the most efficient option even if it's not the most elegant, and note you wouldn't use the namespacing in the binding either if you do it this way.


In case you think that's an odd way to do the selection process, it's quicker to have the single $('#id') search on its own and then do a find() from there, than it is to combine to two. (See http://24ways.org/2011/your-jquery-now-with-less-suck.)


So there you are: how to do publish/subscribe properly with jQuery. (In my opinion.)


UPDATE: One caveat, the events propagate up through the DOM tree, which means that if you have a handler for a custom event higher up the tree it will get called as many times as there are handlers lower down the tree. You can avoid this using the e.stopPropagation() method.



Monday 9 July 2012

Search API, Facet API and Display Suite

Just spent most of the day tracking down a nasty little issue involving these three modules.

Let's face it Search API with Facet API (and all the Search API support modules) are brilliant, the core Search is very difficult to customise and you usually have to end up with nasty core hacks if you want to do anything clever.

Search API on the other hand is lovely, and Facet API is just great with almost everything extendible. And, of course, you can display search results as a view, which adds that level of delightfulness.

Display Suite is also awesome (I may have already mentioned this).

But if you have all three together - displaying search results and facet blocks on a Display Suite configured page, you may run into the problem of the facet blocks refusing to appear.

The reason is really simple: there are no facets to display.

But you say (well, I screamed in my head) I'm displaying search results through a view, I'm looking at them right now and I know they have facets.

I finally, eventually, lit upon this issue in Facet API http://drupal.org/node/1392288 which explains the problem but doesn't come up with any solid solution. The issue is that if the page displays the blocks before the search query has been run they will be empty because search results are needed before the facets can be calculated.

Simple? Yes. Solvable? Not easily. There's no way of telling Display Suite what order you want the blocks and content displayed (it would be a nice touch but not worth for just this problem, or maybe a way to defer content rendering of blocks to the end). There is talk of having the facet run the query if it's not been run, but that's in the future if it ever happens.

The solution is legal but ugly.

The way to ensure the query is run first is to do it in hook_init() in my case by rendering the view and saving it. Then adding the view to the output when required. Yucky but it works.

UPDATE: Typical really, what I hadn't done is fully explored the DS Extras module which allows Views pages to be configured. This is very handy but the issue above still remains.

Wednesday 4 July 2012

Changing view_mode mid-stream

In my current contract I have to display a hierarchy of complex taxonomy terms - each one as a page with relevant data hanging off it. There are three levels to the taxonomy: Level 1 displays one set of data and links, Level 2 is never displayed on its own (which is something I'll have to take care of) and Level 3 has a different page structure again.

Different page layouts means Display Suite (http://drupal.org/project/ds) and that's great. It works fine when you want to configure a different layout for a node - as long as it's the same for every node type. Or entity bundle.

DS works fine for taxonomy terms in just the same way as for nodes. It is one of my favourite modules.

But I needed to be able to change the view_mode on the fly: to check what level the taxonomy term is and change the view_mode based on that. Which is when I ran into trouble - and it's not DS's fault. Though I never had to do it apparently this was not a problem in D6 but in D7 there is a bug which makes it tricky to change view_mode. You can read all about it here: http://drupal.org/node/1154382

This issue gives some hints as to the solution (hook_entity_prepare_view() is not it), but there is a link to this blog here. The solution described  is for changing build mode for nodes based on the current theme (so you can change things if you're using a mobile theme).

My solution is the same except slightly more generic, instead of intercepting hook_node_...() hooks, I intercept hook_entity_...() hooks.

I'm just going to throw my code at you because I know you can work out what to do in your own situation.


/**
 * Implements hook_entity_prepare_view().
 *
 * We have to play silly games to change the view_mode, first we intercept
 * hook_entity_prepare_view() and establish what view_mode we want, and
 * save it. But there's a bug which means this has no effect on the output
 * so...
 */
function page_g2g_entity_prepare_view($entities, $entity_type, $langcode) {
  if ($entity_type!='taxonomy_term') {
    return;
  }


  foreach ($entities as $id => $entity) {
    if ($entity->vocabulary_machine_name!='gtg_tags' || $entity->view_mode!='full') {
      // wrong vocabulary or not a "full page"
      continue;
    }


    // Change the display dependent on the number of parents
    switch (count(taxonomy_get_parents_all($entity->tid))) {

      case 1:

        $entity->view_mode = 'g2g_level_1';
        break;

      case 2:

        // Hm. Need to do something else here, maybe
        // do a redirect to the parent term.
        break;

      case 3:

        $entity->view_mode = 'g2g_level_3';
        break;
    }
  }
}


/**
 * Implements hook_entity_view_alter().
 *
 * ...we intercept before the full build is enacted. You can test and see that
 * even though we changed the view_mode in the term itself, it hasn't transferred
 * to the build theme. So having verified we want to do it with this entity
 * we transfer it. And now it gets changed.
 */
function page_g2g_entity_view_alter(&$build) {
  if (isset($build['#entity_type']) && $build['#entity_type']=='taxonomy_term') {
    $build['#view_mode'] = $build['#term']->view_mode;
  }
}


Arguably you don't need the first hook, you could do it all in the second call. But it's a matter of elegance and splitting actions into their appropriate locations.

Tuesday 29 May 2012

Then three come all at once

I have been doing some work on the field_extract module, a few minor fix-ups most of which wouldn't be noticed and added support for the entityreference field. You can find this module here: http://drupal.org/project/field_extract

Someone I worked with recently has put out my "deeplink" module which allows otherwise hidden content to be made available on a specific trackable URL. My version was Drupal 6 (that's what I was working on at the time) he's doing the D7 upgrade, you can find it http://drupal.org/project/deeplink

But deeplink needs my Controls module, and that's a baby that needs explanation. And that explanation is available on the project page http://drupal.org/project/controls there's both a D6 and D7 version both written by lil ole me.

Briefly: Controls is an API module which provides a similar function to CTools plugins (they have a lot in common), but requires virtually no setting up and is much easier to use. Now I always say that to people but I did seriously wonder whether it was true, so for the last commercial project I worked on I didn't use Controls, I went back to using CTools plugins instead. I desperately wished I hadn't.

So I'll stick by my statement - I think Controls is easier to use and in some ways more versatile than CTools plugins.


However they are also more easily abused. It's something for developers working on an end-client's website. Anyway I'll let you be the judge.


Thursday 12 April 2012

Entities vs Nodes

For the last six months I've been working on a Drupal 6 site professionally, but developing a couple of personal Drupal 7 sites. However I haven't been going into D7 in any great detail - except for developing entities.

Now I've moved contracts and I'm developing a new Drupal 7 site to replace an older non-Drupal site with lots of additional facilities. And the Drupal implementation is entirely up to me.

Being an OOP person at heart I love the concept of entities but when working with a commercial website you have to make some serious decisions. My personal preferences have to give way to the reality of building a website that delivers the spec and can be maintained and extended by other developers in the future.

So how do you decide what should be a node and what should be an entity?

There's a line in this blog post which says:
You can now actually create data structures specific to your application domain with their own database table (or any other storage mechanism really) plus a standardised way to add fields to them. No need to turn nodes into something they are not.
Which is technically accurate but does not always provide clear guidance, so here's my step-by-step analysis method to decide whether a specific data structure should be a node or not:

1. Is it content? Is the item definitely stuff that gets turned into HTML and displayed for the user? If you were building a review site, a review would definitely be content, so that's a node.

2. Does it need to have revisions? The node module provides revisions and the associated modules make it easy and powerful. Building revisions into custom entities is hard. So if it has to have revisions then it has to be a node.

3. Is there additional "property" (as opposed to "field") information? I had a situation where I wanted to define a "proxy", and a proxy needs a web address, a port number, maybe a username and password. These are fundamental properties of a proxy. You could add these as fields for a node, of course, but it makes more sense for them to be properties of a proxy entity. So this should be considered as an entity. (Another way of looking at this is: is there a need for a new table containing information specific to this data structure? If so, think entity.)

4. Is the structure normally invisible to the user? That should be an entity.

5. Would using an entity instead of a node obscure the function? Perhaps this is tricky to answer, after all dividing functionality out to a new object should never make things more complex. But it's worth asking the question.

Any other ways of to help make the decision?

Remember: there is virtually no overhead in creating a new entity. And there are huge advantages in additional functionality that the core, Entity API, Views, Features and other entity-related modules can give you.

Thursday 2 February 2012

Cleaning the watchdog


As a Drupal developer - do you do this?

Do you go through watchdog, find every error and fix it? You probably should - and here's why:

If there's even just a Notice, it means something's not right - checking it out might reveal something far more important.

Every error that goes to Watchdog is consuming valuable processing time. I had an instance quite recently where an error in a third party module was generating 10,000 notices per page. And the original author never noticed. That's ten thousand database writes. As you might imagine fixing it speeded things up quite dramatically.

When you can load any page on your website and have no reports added to the watchdog - you know your site is good.

Optimising JavaScript
On a similar note, I inherited a site which had a lot of JavaScript (all jQuery) which had to run on start up. It wasn't a public-facing site so all the JavaScript wasn't a problem what was a problem was that start-up time on IE7 was sloooooooooow - at least 10 seconds maybe more.

I spent a lot of time justifying this by saying "Well IE7 is slow and its JavaScript runs like a pig" which might be true but the client wasn't buying it and wanted it fixed. Fair enough.

Eventually I came to look at the code and it was possibly the most abysmally written code I have ever seen.

Imagine this code was baking 100 cookies, here's what it did.

  • Fetch the ingredients from the cupboard;
  • Get out enough for 1 cookie;
  • Put the ingredients back in the cupboard;
  • Mix the ingredients;
  • Cut the cookie;
  • Cook the cookie until done;

Repeat 100 times.

It worked, but it was stupid and used the most inefficient jQuery selectors imaginable, and even when it knew what object it wanted to act on (because it had already found it) it would make jQuery find it again, using exactly the same, useless, selector. The same coder, I later discovered, who in another script had written $('#x').parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent();

I re-coded it to make 100 cookies in a single batch. Start-up time <1sec.

This is a good site for jQuery optimisation: http://hungred.com/useful-information/jquery-optimization-tips-and-tricks/

Monday 30 January 2012

Little debugging aid

I had been having a real problem tracking down a PHP error in Drupal which was passing an array to htmlspecialchars() in check_plain() instead of a string. I needed to use debug_backtrace() but the issue was related to Views which meant that the arguments being passed at higher levels were catastrophically huge.

It was a real problem, using krumo just resulted in out-of-memory errors. And the problem was also happening inside AJAX calls so any attempt to simply print the output was doomed.

I needed a way to get a function backtrace which was not too verbose, didn't crash the machine and would work in an AJAX call.

The solution is the following routine which takes a debug_backtrace() extracts only the information we need and outputs to a file. It's not Drupal-specific but you may need to set up the directory:


/**
 * Backtrace to a file for when nothing else works
 */
function debug_backtrace_file($fname = 'backtrace') {
  $file = fopen("c:\\tmp\\{$fname}.log", 'ab');
  if (!$file) {
    return;
  }
  fputs($file, '=============== ' . date('Y-m-d H:i:s') . " ===============\n");
  $line = __LINE__;
  foreach (debug_backtrace() as $entry) {
    $function = $entry['function'];
    if ($function!=__FUNCTION__) {
      if (isset($entry['class']) && $entry['class']) {
        $function = "{$entry['class']}::$function";
      }
      fputs($file, sprintf("function %s at line %d in file %s\n", $function, $line, isset($entry['file'])?$entry['file']:t('unknown')));
    }
    $line = $entry['line'];
  }
  fclose($file);
}


Happy bug hunting.

Thursday 26 January 2012

Where the **** is it?

You know how it is? You have this complex and massive PHP structure with recursive elements and somewhere in all that is a value you're looking for. Views object I'm looking at you!

Here's a PHP routine, which is not Drupal specific, that will dig down into an object to find the property or array item you're looking for - and it avoids recursion by keeping a list of structures it's already searched by MD5ing the serialized version of the structure.

The parameters are the initial structure to search; the property you're looking for - it can be partial if you're not sure what the property is called; $id would usually be the identifier of the structure you're supplying and $depth should be ignored. It returns an array of strings that show the way into the structure to find the property. It's quite common to get multiple results.

One thing to watch out for: If your structure is recursive (like a Views object) and you start the search deeper into the structure with the idea that you'll shorten the search? Well you might, but if it's recursive you might also end up going into one of the recursed objects because the routine hasn't seen it before.

Anyway, with that in mind, here it is:


function common_locate($struct, $seek, $id = '', $depth = 0) {
  static $structs = array(), $results = array();
  if (is_array($struct) || is_object($struct)) {
    $struct = (array) $struct;
    foreach ($struct as $key => $value) {
      if (strpos($key, $seek)!==FALSE) {
        $results[] = "$id => $key = $value";
      }
      if (is_array($value)) {
        $idx = str_replace('0', 'g', md5(serialize($value)));
        if (!isset($structs[$idx])) {
          $structs[$idx] = "$key:$depth";
          common_locate($value, $seek, "{$id}[$key]", $depth+1);
        }
      }
      elseif (is_object($value)) {
        $idx = str_replace('0', 'g', md5(serialize($value)));
        if (!isset($structs[$idx])) {
          $structs[$idx] = "object:$key:$depth";
          common_locate($value, $seek, "{$id}->$key", $depth+1);
        }
      }
    }
  }
  return $results;
}

Wednesday 25 January 2012

Wiki filter for Drupal


One of the known problems with Drupal is no Wiki module. It is possible to put together a Wiki using various resources but the biggest stumbling block is the text filter.


There have been attempts and some successes. The current perceived wisdom is to use FlexiFilter - sorry but it's just too cumbersome. In fact nightmarish.


And I needed a Wiki filter for a project so this evening I spent 5 hours writing a Wiki filter for Drupal 7.


Does pretty much everything you could want including nested OL/UL lists which can be mixed - I only mention that particularly because it was a bitch. Otherwise it's got italics, bold, underline, strikethrough, h2-h6, blockquotes, code (pre), superscript and subscript.


So to set up a Wiki Text format on Drupal 7 you use these in this order:

  • Limit allowed HTML tags - to none, to clear out any tags in the text.
  • Then my filter
  • Convert line breaks
  • Assign IDs to anchors (From the TOC module)
  • Table of contents filter module
  • Freelinking module to deal with URL links

Then have WikiTools hijack Freelinking (it's an option). And configure the rest as desired.


Voila! A Drupal Wiki.


I will be putting it onto drupal.org presently.

Saturday 21 January 2012

Stable Field Value Extraction module released

Okay, after weeks of nobody complaining about any aspect of my field_extract module I have finally got around to issuing the code as the full stable version. Hurray.

Now because I'm lazy I use Eclipse for development purposes - I know, I know, how can I be a proper developer if I don't use Linux and Vim? Well, I don't. I was using command line before you were born (unless you were born before 1983). Been there, done that.

However Eclipse and Drupal Git are strange bedfellows, and it can take a bit of work learning how they can be made to work together.

Getting Drupal repos cloned locally isn't too much of an issue once you've got your SSH keys sorted out, and for cloning you can happily use http.

Pushing upstream is another matter entirely (and you will to need to use just Push... instead of Push upstream... until you get it sorted out and configured). If you try using http you may well hit a brick wall, just as I did. the trick is to use git+ssh for your protocol, and it'll work nicely. One thing, which is obvious unless you forget it, is to include Add all tags spec if you are uploading tags as well as branches. Ahem.

Hopefully it won't be so long before my next posting - I have a fun new website specifically for developers coming up. I think you're going to like it, it provides a service that all developers need from time to time, and there is only one website I've found that fulfils the need, and not as well as my version. It's written in D7 of course, leveraging it as a development framework rather than a CMS.

And with that enigma, I'll leave you.