Question

I am building an idea capture website from the Array Shift installation profile of drupal and I’m trying to create a similar entry lookup for when a user starts to create a new idea. Is there a way I can detect when the user is typing text into the title field of the create new idea form (a new content type I created in cck) and then, using ajax, create a dynamic dropdown list of all other posted ideas that are similar based on custom sql queries I create? I’ve seen this done in many 3rd party COTS tools for idea capture, not to mention right here in Stackoverflow, and I’m hoping to do the same in drupal. Right now, the only ways I can think of to do this is to hack the cck module, which I know is not a good idea, or to somehow hook into that form somehow. I’m not sure how to do that. Do I use hook_form_alter()? I’m using drupal 6.16 and CCK 6.x-2.7. Thanks.

Answer 1

I solved my own problem. Here’s what I did:

• set up a drupal.behavior of onchange for the title textfield
• made an ajax call inside that onchange handler
• connected the ajax call to a path that corresponds to a callback function I created in a custom module
• Critical: I had to disable and then re-enable that custom module in order for the callback function to ever be called (the one defined in a hook_menu())
• made a sql query in the callback function that looked for similar ideas in the db
• made the results print out in a markup element I placed just below the title textfield. I wrapped the results in tags that link to their respective idea pages.

And voila, it works like a charm now! I had to piece together about 10 tutorials to figure this out.