Customize advanced search form

By augustekman on 21 Mar 2008 at 15:19 UTC

I'm totally stuck on this one. For my homepage, I've almost managed to create a great theme, but I'm stuck on the only thing left on my to-do-list.

The advanced search form. This is what I want to achieve:

• Remove the "first" submit button (the one in the basic search).
• Add an onclick="blah();" on the basic search text field.
• Add a

around the basic search part and a

around the other part, to be able to either show the basic or the advanced search, not both at the same time.
• Add a link in the advanced search part ("Basic search"), which while clicked, makes the advanced search form collapse and show the basic search form again.
• Change the "Advanced search" label/link thing a bit...

The presentation part, html/javascript/css, is no problem. But getting Drupal to change the advanced search thing seems too hard for me.

• The form can be hard-coded in php. There's no need for other dynamics than the adding/removing of taxonomies. My theme is not likely to show up on other sites in its present form.

What I've found out and tried:

I've found the search_view function (search.module), that calls the basic form, and node_form_alter (node.module), that adds the advanced search part to it. But I wasn't able to add a working theme_form_alter to my theme. Is that even possible?

I also tried to replace the $output = drupal_get_form('search_form', NULL, $keys, $type); line with a call to a theme function. I get the form exactly the way I want, but when searching, Drupal either just silently ignores the search and displays the form again, or whines about "Form validation failed".

Comments

My solution

augustekman commented 23 March 2008 at 21:25

Ok, so after some work, I came up with this solution, with modified search.module and node.module.

In search.module I modified function search_form()

This:



  $form['basic']['inline']['submit'] = array('#type' => 'submit', '#value' => t('Search'));

  return $form;

Into this:



  if ($type == 'node' && user_access('use advanced search')) {
  	$form['basic']['#prefix'] = '<div id="basic-search"><a href="' . $action . '" onclick="showAdvancedSearch(); return false;" class="search-switch">' . t('Advanced search') . '</a>';
  	$form['basic']['#suffix'] = '</div>';
  }
  else {
  	$form['basic']['inline']['submit'] = array('#type' => 'submit', '#value' => t('Search'));
  }

  return $form;

And in node.module I changed function node_form_alter():



$form['advanced'] = array(
    	'#prefix' => '<div id="advanced-search"><a href="/search/node" onclick="collapseAdvancedSearch(); return false;" class="search-switch">' . t('Basic search') . '</a><h2>' . t('Advanced search') . '</h2>',
    	'#suffix' => '</div>',
      //'#type' => 'fieldset',
      //'#title' => t('Advanced search'),
      //'#collapsible' => TRUE,
      //'#collapsed' => TRUE,
      //'#attributes' => array('id' => 'search-advanced'),
    );

There are javascript functions and styles as well, but I won't present them here for now.

Is it really not possible to alter a form from the template.php file instead of changing the drupal modules? (I tried but didn't get it to work)