Module development and code questions

I've got a Drupal module that creates nodes. In my node_form hook I have several form fields that are returned. For several reasons I need to access those fields on the fly in javascript ... here's the problem.

Drupal creates form fields like this

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<form action="/node/add/song" method="post" name="frmSongForm" enctype="multipart/form-data" id="node-form">

<input type="text" maxlength="64" class="form-text required" name="edit[firstname]" id="edit-firstname" size="40" value="The Yellow Dart" />

</form>
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This is nice and makes my life easier on the php side, but it makes things a big problem when I try to get a handle on the field in javascript! For instance I try the following:

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firstname = document . frmSongForm . edit[firstname] . value;
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And javascript says 'undefined!'. I have looked high and low for a way to get a grasp on these form fields using javascript and nobody seems to have a solution. Am I missing something obvious here? Or is this truly impossible.

PS: Yes, If I make up my own form field I can access it just fine. However, this is nasty and a hack. For instance, the following code works just fine (NOTE: The name of the field!):

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Hi all,

I'm developing a module where each member has their own page, and would like members to be able to access there own pages and other peoples pages via -

www.mydrupalsite.com/?q=username or www.mydrupalsite.com/username

(a member's page isn't private anyone can access it)

Okay, perhaps I'm just easily confused, but I cannot make heads or tails out of form validation.

I am attempting to perform validation on a field that has been added to an existing form.

I've added a textfield to the form that appears on admin/settings/content-types/(nodetype), and I want to be able to make sure that a positive integer is entered into that field.

I'm attempting to create a very simple module to limit the number of nodes that can be created per user, per node type, and I wanted to add a field to the admin/settings/content-types/(nodetype) page, where the admin could enter an integer for how many nodes of that type that each user could create.

Now, the easy part was creating the alter_form thingy, to add the appropriate field to the form. I got that working just fine. It saves to the database properly and everything.

But then I wanted to make sure that the admin entered an a positive integer or zero. Glancing through the API, I'd seen an attribute for form elements, "#validate", and thought it would be simple. Here I sit, eight hours later, completely frazzled.

The sample code on the Forms API Reference page either doesn't work, or I completely don't understand it.

The code in the Forms API FAQ entry (http://drupal.org/node/36899) under "How do you use the #validation arguments?" doesn't even _look_ like it would work (no quotes around #valid or #validation arguments)

I had just started putting a new site together with 4.7 from CVS from a couple weeks ago.

I am sort of new to Drupal but was pretty sure I needed to use tox to classify my nodes. I have only added a few nodes so far but had added terms to them. I then started to try out a couple other tox mods to see how this all worked; I had the tox_block and tox_theme mods working fine.

Then I figured I should likely start looking at categories since I thought this was likely the way I SHOULD be doing this.

I went through install process (even though I think install.txt is a bit confusing) - but I think I did things correctly. I imported my existing nodes from one vocab to a category. This worked fine.

NOW... the issues:

- some of my nodes don't show up as orphans - no big deal

- when I am logged in as admin and I go to a node - I can no longer EDIT the node

- I read a post about this and someone suggested disabling/enabling categories to fix this.... OOOPS!!

- once I disabled "Categories" module and hit save; my site was gone.

I get " Call to undefined function: category_select_nodes()"

So I guess it makes sense that I wouldn't be able to find this function since I just disabled it - but pretty sure it shouldn't kill my site.

Hopefully just removing the category mod will repair this - but I kinda doubt it... stay tuned...

Have I installed something incorrectly here?

How do you do!
We Beg pardon for my english since write by means of translator.
I interest the module a NOTICE-BOARD for accomodation of information on car, there is such marketed under Drupal.
Respectfully yours, Mihail.

I'm modifying block.module to allow Drupal to display blocks based upon the role a user is assigned. I have this code:

  $rroles="SELECT name FROM role";
  $rrroles = db_fetch_array(db_query($rroles));
  
	   foreach ($rrroles as $reles => $names) {
		    $options = array();
		    $options[] = t($names);
	    }

But it only returns one result. I've tried a while loop but the page hangs. All help would be deeply appreciated.