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July 20, 2012 - Comments Off on Drupal: Connecting to multiple databases in your module

Drupal: Connecting to multiple databases in your module

Have you ever needed your Drupal site to access data from a different database? from a different Drupal installation? The Drupal database abstraction layer has the ability to switch between databases! We are working on a project that requires a Drupal website to talk to another database on the same server. Updates to the website must also be made to the other database, in this case a membership directory.

By setting up multiple databases in the settings.php file for your site, you can load up your data from the website, then switch to the second database to make updates. If you are doing data migration from one Drupal site to another, this can be very handy.

First, in settings.php expand the default database declaration array:

[cce_php]
$databases['default']['default'] = array(
      'database' => 'drupalsite',
      'username' => 'drupalsite_user',
      'password' => 'drupalsite_pass',
      'host' => 'localhost',
      'port' => '3306',
      'driver' => 'mysql',
      'prefix' => '',
    );
$databases['external']['default'] = array(
      'database' => 'groucho_db',
      'username' => 'groucho',
      'password' => 'groucho',
      'host' => 'localhost',
      'port' => '3306',
      'driver' => 'mysql',
      'prefix' => '',
    );

Then in your new module you can load your data:

/**
 * Implements hook_user_save().
 */
function awesome_user_save(&$user) {
  $user_obj = user_load($user->uid);
  // Load the Users favorite Beatle (George, of course)
  if(isset($user->field_favorite_beatle['und']) {
    $favorite_beatle = $user_obj->field_favorite_beatle['und'][0]['value];
  } else {
    $favorite_beatle = 'George Harrison';
  }

  if(db_set_active('groucho')) {
    $result  = db_update('Users')
        ->fields(array('Fav_Beatle'=>$favorite_beatle))
        ->condition('user_id', $user->uid, '=')
        ->execute();
    // Check on success of query
    if(!$result) {
      // Error executing query
    }
    elseif($result->rowCount() > 0) {
      // Query succeeded- rowCount() will report number of rows affected
    }
    else {
      // Query ran, but no rows were affected
    }
    db_set_active();
  }
}
[/cce_php]

With some error checking in there, and ensuring that db_set_active() is called at the end, you have loaded data from your Drupal site and entered into an external database! This can be run in the other direction too. You can retrieve data from another database and populate Drupal objects like nodes and users directly. The things to watch out for with this method are that the database engines must be the same, i.e., mysql, postgres, etc., and to be sure you find more information of which database is active when you are accessing data.

Published by: chazcheadle in The Programming Mechanism
Tags: , , ,

July 17, 2012 - Comments Off on Drush de Jour: Reset user passwords and e-mail one-time login links

Drush de Jour: Reset user passwords and e-mail one-time login links

Do you have users that like to forget their passwords? Here are 2 methods for getting new ones (the passwords, not the users!)

% drush upwd username

And here is how to create a one-time login link for a user that has forgotten their password. (again?!)

% drush user-login username

The output will be something like this:

http://example.com/user/reset/17/13425300/c18Zh_dYH2XxHzBcJU9jU

Just email that link to your user and they can log in and reset their password.

If you know their email address you could be clever and do something like this:

drush uli username | mail -s 'Reset password request' useremail
The Drush de Jour brings you the latest and possibly greatest bits of drush wisdom we use for developing and maintaining our Drupal sites.

Published by: chazcheadle in The Programming Mechanism
Tags: , ,

June 14, 2012 - Comments Off on How to programmatically pass an argument to a view in a Quicktab

How to programmatically pass an argument to a view in a Quicktab

We are building a site in which we are using taxonomy term page templates to display some content. One of the requirements is to include a section at the bottom of the page with tabbed content which is related to the current term.
The page path will look like this: site.com/topics/topic-name. Where topic-name is a taxonomy term name. For this project, we're using the excellent Quicktabs module.

First we create the view which provides the Quicktabs content. The view will display content based on the taxonomy term being viewed, so we add a contextual filter ('arguments' in D6) based on the Term ID. Normally, the contextual filter will get its parameters from the URL, but we're using pathauto to make the URL look nice and so the taxonomy term name as represented in the path will not translate to an argument that the view can use.

Add contextual filter

Add contextual filter

At this point, the view won't work correctly, since it is expecting a term Id and the path arguments will be text. But that is ok, we're not done yet.

What we need is a way to pass the taxonomy term id to the view, but we must do so through the Quicktabs object.
Quicktabs is very cool, but as you can see in this screenshot, there is no way to pass the term id to the view with this form when the term is not in the URL.

Quicktabs settings

Quicktabs settings

As with the view we created earlier, we'll set this up and move on to the next step which will tie all of these parts together.

We created a taxonomy term template to theme the display of our terms, and that gives us access to the term id, $tid, and that is precisely what we need to feed to our view! In our term template file we print out the terms fields like we want and then at the bottom, we add a few lines of code that will send the term id to the view through the Quicktabs object and then render it.

Here's the code:

//Load the Quicktab instance and assign it to a variable we can manipulate
$qtabs = quicktabs_load('topic_tabs');
foreach($qtabs->tabs AS $item => $id) {
// Here we pass the $tid to the 'args' element of the each tab
$qtabs->tabs[$item]['args'] = $tid;
}
// Create a render array of the newly modified Quicktabs instance.
$quicktabs = quicktabs_build_quicktabs('topic_tabs', $overrides = array(), $other = array());
print render($quicktabs);

And here is the resulting themed and tid aware Quicktab:

Quicktabs with filtered view content

Quicktabs with filtered view content

Now, when we visit any term page, we will see the content and at the bottom will be the Quicktabs with the relevant content.
This can be extend in several ways. You can alter the tab titles, default active tab, the tab order, etc. all on the fly based on any number of variables.

References:

Published by: chazcheadle in The Programming Mechanism
Tags: , ,