$Id: USAGE.txt,v 1.1.2.3 2008-03-12 21:18:41 add1sun Exp $ See README.txt for a description of this module. See this documentation online at http://drupal.org/node/228167. USING PREPOPULATE MODULE ======================== Simple Usage ------------ Prepopulate the title field on a node creation form: http://www.example.com/node/add/content?edit[title]=This is the title With 'non-clean' urls: http://www.example.com?q=node/add/content&edit[title]=This is the title How to find what variable to set -------------------------------- This can be tricky, but there are a few things to keep in mind that should help. Prepopulate.module is quite simple. It looks through the form, looking for a variable that matches the name given on the URL, and puts the value in when it finds a match. Drupal keeps HTML form entities in an edit[] array structure. All your variables will be contained within the edit[] array. A good starting point is to look at the HTML code of a rendered Drupal form. Once you find the appropriate (or tag, use the value of the name attribute in your URL, contained in the edit array. For example, if the tag looks like this: then try this URL: http://www.example.com/node/add/content?edit[title]=Automatic filled in title CCK fields are a bit more complicated: The key is to put this in the edit[] array nested, like this: http://www.example.com/node/add/content?edit[field_office][0][node_name]=AL-235 Another example:

would be:

http://www.example.com/node/add/content?edit[field_content][0][value]=A long text string

and, again, for non-clean URLs, it's:

http://www.example.com?q=node/add/content&edit[field_content][0][value]=A long text string

Body fields
-----------

Body fields are different. Though their HTML entity looks like this:
  <textarea id="edit-body" class="form-textarea resizable processed"
  name="body" rows="20" cols="60"/>

You can't just take the name "body," throw it into a edit[body] and
expect it to work. Drupal wraps the body field into a "body_filter"
array when it gets processed. So, for body fields, a URL like:

http://www.example.com/node/add/content?edit[body_filter][body]=This is the body

ought to do the trick.

Multiple fields
---------------

Prepopulate can handle pre-filling multiple fields from one URL. Just
separate the edit variables with an ampersand:

http://www.example.com/node/add/content?edit[title]=The title&edit[body_filter][body]=The body

You're already using the ampersand with non-clean URLs:

http://www.example.com?q=node/add/content&edit[title]=The title&edit[body_filter][body]=The body

Escaping special characters
---------------------------

Some characters can't be put into URLs. Spaces, for example, work
mostly, but occasionally they'll have to be replaced with the string %20.
This is known as "percent encoding." Wikipedia has a partial list of
percent codes at:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding

If you're having trouble getting content into field names, or are
getting 'page not found' errors from Drupal, you should check to ensure
that illegal characters are properly encoded.

Bookmarklets
------------

Prepopulate.module was created for bookmarklets. Here is the actual
bookmarklet I use to post web links to my site:

javascript:u=document.location.href;t=document.title;s=window.getSelection();void(window.open(%22http://oif.eafarris.com/node/add/content-web-link?edit[title]=%22+escape(t)+'&edit[body_filter][body]='+escape(s)+'&edit[field_url][0][value]='+escape(u),'_blank','width=1024,height=500,status=yes,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes'));

This turns into a URL like this:

http://oif.eafarris.com/node/add/content-web-link?edit[title]=drupal.org%20%7C%20Community%20plumbing&edit[body_filter][body]=&edit[field_url][0][value]=http%3A//drupal.org/

If I had first selected some text on the page, it would be put into the
body of the node.

Happy prepopulating!