Programmatically Adding Pre-Built Option Lists to Drupal Webforms

Submitted by Mark Jarrell on Wed, 05/12/2010 - 20:53

I'm a huge fan of the Webform module (and building Drupal forms in general), and I just today noticed a feature I hadn't previously taken advantage of. This is the ability to programmatically add what are called "pre-built" option lists that can be used in your webforms.

Webform pre-built options list in action

Let's say that you want the user to select his/her age from a dropdown. Age possibilities range from 1-100. Without a pre-built option list, you'd have to type in 0|0, 1|1, 2|2, etc. into the "options" field. You can now do this using the webform api and a small custom module for your site.

In your custom module, you have to declare your new options list. Here's an example:

<?php
/**
* Implementation of hook_webform_select_options_info().
* See webform/webform_hooks.php for further information on this hook in the Webform API.
*/
function YOURMODULENAME_webform_select_options_info() {
  $items = array();
  $items['one_onehundred'] = array(
    'title' => t('Numbers 1-100'),
    'options callback' => 'YOURMODULENAME_options_one_onehundred'
  );
  return $items;
}
?>

After that, you need to write a function that spits out the options list. For this example, that looks like:

<?php
/**
* Build an options list for use by webforms.
*/
function YOURMODULENAME_options_one_onehundred() {
  $options = array();
  for ($x=1; $x <= 100; $x++) {
    $options[$x] = $x;
  }
  return $options;
}
?>

After that, just enable your custom module, and you should be able to use your new pre-built options list in your webforms. Check out the webform_hooks.php file (included in the Webform module directory) for more information.

Note: This is for Drupal 6 and Webform 3.0-beta 5.

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Comments on This Post:

Cool subject, I didn't know

Submitted by peach - all drupal themes (not verified) on Thu, 05/13/2010 - 05:14.

Cool subject, I didn't know you could do that. Though I feel compelled to point out that age can be higher than 100.