Conditionally hidden fields are not cleared when they contain values

Attached is the patch that I have been using, which seems to fully clear accidental entries into conditionally hidden fields, simply by also clearing the $form_state entry for any hidden fields.

Does this seem like a universally useful addition?

Just wanted to check-in on this. Any thoughts on the problem as outlined and the patch?

@joecanti - The patch is relative to the module directory, and you should be able to apply it from that point with patch -p0 < 1264656-1_clear_conditionally_hidden_fields.patch. Let us know if that doesn't work.

@tedbrow - Thanks for taking a look at this. I agree that the eval statement is not ideal, and I too was looking for a way around that. In order to clear the appropriate $form_state entries the patch is looking to the #array_parents array to find the hierarchical set of keys that define form elements that need to be cleared. The keys it needs are values in the #array_parents array, which need to be translated to a set of multidimensional keys (and a dynamic amount of them) which then need to be appended onto "$form_state['values']" to create the correct variable definition for the variable to be cleared. I looked at using "variable variables" (http://php.net/manual/en/language.variables.variable.php) to do this, but they do not seem to work for variables passed by reference. Because of this, and my need to just get a quick fix in place, I saw that I was able to make it work with eval and stopped there (I was up against a deadline on a project). I'm sure there is a better technique for this, and probably an easy one, that I'm hoping someone with a bit more php experience might be able apply.

Hi Joe,

Based on the content in your attached txt file it looks like you got the patch to apply fine. It's important to note that nothing actually gets cleared until the form is submitted. So you won't see any of the conditional sub-options (that were "erroneously" still selected when the user changed the main option that the sub-option was dependent on) being cleared while filling-in the form. You will only see this clearing action after submission within the actual form results.

From what I can see, the main module code always did some clearing upon submission, but it only seemed to work if the page was re-loaded (e.g. upon re-displaying the form while also showing validation errors). The problem was that "erroneous" conditional form entries were not always properly cleared within the final recorded results. This latter issues is all that this patch attempts to fix.

Hope that helps a bit.

Ahhh, you are systematically using =& to point to the right place in the array to clear. That makes much better sense.

Hi Ted,

I tried out your version on a (relatively) complex form with multiple pages, nested conditionals, date fields, etc... and it seems to work just as my previous version did (proper clearing took place upon submit/save/pager). So it's looking like your re-coded version is the way to go.