Display records from Database

Jason: Thanks for your input. You have me about 99% of the way. If you can get me that last 1% maybe we can talk about that bridge. If it's that pretty one on the east side of Manhattan I might be interested at the right price.

I've read the documentation but the CVS stuff is a bit much for me so I haven't had a look at your database examples. And yes, by the time you are at your third beta release I'm sure you guys have this all well in hand. But the documentation on how to access CCK fields is really lacking and needs someone's attention.

But in any case, my code shown below, executes fine in Drupal 7 and retrieves the single record from a custom content type: 'links'. The 'links' content type has two custom fields: link_url and link_category. The change I had to make from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 to access those two 'CCK' fields was as follows:

Drupal 6

$lu=$node->field_link_url[0]['value'];
$lc=$node->field_link_category[0]['value'];

Drupal 7
$lu=$node->field_link_url[und][0]['value'];
$lc=$node->field_link_category[und][0]['value'];

So it was that extra [und] that was the source of my problem. The need for this change going from D6 to D7 may be well documented in the Drupal 7 docs but it didn't quite jump out at me.

One surprise to me was the fact that $lc, a text field selected by a checkbox, returns an index only and not the referenced string value. That seems odd but a print_r($node) returns the following for field_link_category and you can see that all I'm getting is the index from the checkbox list. If you have any insight on that issue you would get credit for that last 1%.

Here is the print_r($node) listing for the link_category field:

[field_link_category] => Array
(
[und] => Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[value] => 2
)

)

)

And here is the code:

>
// Run the query and fetch the first (and only) record/row
$result = db_query("SELECT * FROM {node} WHERE type = :type", array(':type' => 'links',));
$record = $result->fetch(); 

// print the fields/values of $record
print('<pre>');
print_r($record);
print('</pre>');

// load the node - should include custom fields
$node = node_load($record->nid);

// Let's take a look at what $node returns
print('<pre>');
print_r($node);
print('</pre>');

// And then retrieve the field values
$t=$node->title;
$lu=$node->field_link_url[und][0]['value'];
$lc=$node->field_link_category[und][0]['value'];

//Prints Title OK
print('Title Field = '.$t);
print('<br>');

// Prints Link URL Field OK
print('Link URL Field = '.$lu);
print('<br>');

//Prints Link Category as an integer (from check box)
//$node does NOT return the value of Link Category 
print('Link Category Field = '.$lc);