Drupal 7.x

Sorting of products in Drupal Commerce Add To Cart form

This is a quick post regarding the sort order of option elements in the Drupal Commerce Add to Cart form as part of Product Reference fields.

I was confused as to how this was sorting. It does not sort by the Product title. It does not sort by the Product entity identifier. On my development site, the options seemed to be sorting by SKU.

There were a couple options to look into:

Getting HTML5 video to work with iOS Mobile Safari

I’ve been researching issues regarding serving HTML5 video content to iOS devices this past week. Here’s an outline the issues and some concise answers as to how iOS Mobile Safari 6 will handle HTML5 video. This post won’t touch on video encoding.

Mobile Safari’s QuickTime component does not handle HTTP requests the same as it does normally, say for a web page. Instead

Rules-provided entity variables: Where are my field properties?

At times I am confused by behavior in the powerful Rules module. Sometimes Rules data selectors for entities have their fields listed and sometimes they do not. I did not find documentation about this behavior.

So I dug through code…

Taxonomy Views Browser of Arbitrary Depth

Here’s a way to create a View (Drupal 7, Views 3.x) that lets you browse an arbitrarily-deep taxonomy hierarchy. With this type of browser you can link, oh, say, a large collection of videos, or photo galleries, or any kind of huge list of content categorized in a nested tree.

First, an simple static taxonomy term browser:

Drupal Queue API example: enqueue in form submit handler, dequeue when cron runs

Need to store up some items and process them en masse in a cron job? That’s a perfect use case for the Queue API (for Drupal 7+) or the drupal_queue module (the backport for Drupal 6).

Concrete example: One of our consulting clients was using a synchronous webservice for their retail store locator. We needed to create a form where store owners could change whether they’re listed in the store locator. When a store owner submits the form, should she have to wait around while our site sends her change to the store locator webservice? We didn’t think so. So we decided to use Drupal’s Queue API, which lets us save up all the store owners’ changes and send them to the webservice in a batch.

Here’s a simple example of adding items to a queue in a form submit handler and processing them in the next cron run.

ctools Modals and Vertical Tabs

The Chaos tool suite (ctools) is collection of useful methods intended to help Drupal developers create complex interfaces without duplicating too much effort.

Drupal 7 introduced a new Form API element: Vertical Tabs. When you set a parent element as this Form API type, then any child elements that are of type fieldset are displayed as vertical tabs instead of as in the traditional fieldset. Unfortunately for us developers, the documentation does not provide an example of how to use Vertical Tabs properly, but with some trial and error you can do it.

However, this new Vertical Tab Form API element doesn’t work in modal multistep wizard forms created with ctools.