[Form API] Displaying results after form submission (and still displaying the form) [#941508]

Hi,

I've been looking for days for the proper way to perform a query and display the results after a form has been submitted, while still displaying the form at the top of the results page. Something like standard search / filter forms do. I didn't want to use drupal_set_message() which is not appropriate since I don't want to return a status message, but a whole HTML section that should be printed below the form. The only post I could find was an unanswered Drupal 4.7 issue... :-/

I think I've found the proper way, could you please confirm the following code is OK so I can submit a new book page in the Form API 6.x section?

Let's consider a form whose $form_id is "mymodule_example_form". The function called on submit is "mymodule_example_form_submit". Here is the code :

function mymodule_example_form_submit(&$form, &$form_state) {

  // here, I would look into $form_state['values'] to get submitted values
  $my_interesting_value = $form_state['values']['XXX'];

  // here, I would then perform a custom query...
  $html = _mymodule_get_html_results($my_interesting_value);

  // ...and add the result to the form
  $form['#suffix'] = $html;

  // disable redirection (= return to the submitted form)
  $form_state['redirect'] = FALSE;

}

Notice that I've used &form as first argument, so I can alter the form object itself.

Thank you in advance for your review / remarks / suggestions.

Comments

Comment #1

nclavaud commented 14 October 2010 at 14:18

Title:	Displaying results after form submission (and still displaying the form)	» [Form API] Displaying results after form submission (and still displaying the form)
Status:	Active	» Needs review

Comment #2

wrburgess commented 14 November 2010 at 04:18

I've got the same exact question if anyone can answer.

Comment #3

Sylvain_G commented 9 December 2010 at 21:50

Comment #4

arianek commented 10 December 2010 at 04:30

Issue tags:

+form API

Comment #5

jhodgdon

she/her

English

commented 21 December 2010 at 21:03

Component:	New documentation	» Correction/Clarification
Issue tags:		+developer, +d7docs

tagging

Comment #6

darrellduane commented 5 March 2011 at 07:17

Thanks so much for putting this in here, I've been looking all over for this, its working for me.

Comment #7

rfay

he,him

English

Palisade, CO, USA

commented 6 March 2011 at 04:18

I guess I would do this in the form body rather than in the submit.

The most standard way to do this (used by search, for example) is to turn the "interesting value" into a URL (GET params) and then have the page generation itself use *that* to generate the page (either generating it within the form builder, or building the page which includes a form and other data). The good thing about this is that it means the URL can be cached, that the search results can be achieved in other ways, etc.

So these models work:

$page = $form . $other_data_based_on_get_params

make the form builder function output your extra stuff based on $form_state

Your technique of tacking on #suffix in the submit is like the second of these. It doesn't have the advantages of the first one, but it works.

Comment #8

steven jones commented 11 March 2011 at 17:22

Status:

Needs review

» Active

Randy this is an incredibly common thing that you'd want to do, and there a so many ways to do it, would you accept a patch that adds a couple of examples to the Examples project that shows the different ways to implement such functionality and documents it? We could then pop a page in the handbook that points at the code.

(I'm not sure there is a page here that needs reviewing, so marking back to 'active' for now.)