Properly render a field

Drupal offers a few (sometimes complicated...) solutions to output a field. Lets take an example with a date field.
To display the full rendered field: field_view_field()

  1. $mydate = field_view_field('node', $node, 'field_mydate');
  2. print render($mydate);
  3.  
  4. /*display
  5. <div class="field field-name-field-mydate field-type-date field-label-above">
  6.   <div class="field-label">Date:</div>
  7.   <div class="field-items">
  8.     <div class="field-item even">
  9.       <span class="date-display-single">Wednesday, 10 October, 2012</span>
  10.     </div>
  11.   </div>
  12. </div>
  13. */

note: default wrappers will be displayed (even if you choose to not display the label in the display settings for instance...)
to choose a different formatter than the default one

  1. $mydate = field_view_field('node', $node, 'field_mydate', array('type'=>'my_custom_one');

To display the raw value of the field: field_get_items()

  1. $mydate = field_get_items('node', $node, 'field_mydate');
  2. print $mydate[0]['value'];
  3. //display 2012-10-10T00:00:00

will display the value as it exists on the db. Can be useful for strings.

To display the formatted value, without any < div >: field_view_value()

  1. $mydate = field_get_items('node', $node, 'field_mydate');
  2. $output = field_view_value('node', $node, 'field_mydate' , $mydate[0]);
  3. print $output['#markup']; //for files use render($output);
  4. //display <span class="date-display-single">Wednesday, 10 October, 2012</span>

will display the formatted value, with only a surrounding span.
note: you can specify a formatter to display an image with a preset

  1. $output = field_view_value('node', $node, 'field_myimage', $myimage[0], array(
  2.   'type' => 'image',
  3.   'settings' => array(
  4.     'image_style' => 'thumbnail',
  5.     'image_link' => 'content',
  6.   ),
  7. ));

not so easy !!

Fine tune node permissions

The default CRUD + view operations on nodes can be fine tuned by using

Change hook order

Different implementations of the same hook execute in an order based on the weight value in the system table then the alphabetical order. You can change the order by updating the weight in the db but it could be more fine tuned to just change the hook order by using hook_module_implements_alter().

Ajax / Json

How-to simply update a piece of content on click with Jquery?
in your .module file

Extract page content while simple testing with xpath and DOM

It is sometimes useful to grab content from the page that is currently tested. The idea is to search for the tag with xpath then convert it to DOM to get data... For instance, let's get the title and the href value of the second tab.

Import an external file

file_save_data does (almost) all the job for us and drupal_http_request allows to get the file even through a proxy.

Programmatically redirect

There is a drupal function ready to use to redirect called drupal_goto();
but this function does a direct redirection and sometimes it is useful to let Drupal continue doing his stuff by setting $_GET['destination'] instead

xpath examples & domxpath use with drupal

When the wonderful Feeds module can not be used it is useful to know how to use domxpath and to write queries.
usage:

Create a csv file

this is php code using Drupal file stream

Dependent field in views plugin

When building views plugin it is better to use ctools #dependency property than #state FAPI

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