Replicating the noSubmitButton behaviour with a select element

Replicating the noSubmitButton behaviour with a select element

by David Poly -
Number of replies: 2

Hi,

In a plugin I'm developing, I needed to have a select act on change the same way as a nosubmit button does, so that it reloads the updated form without going through validation. The form layout needed to be updated on reload based on the newly selected option.

What I have so far:

In my mod_form's definition, I turned my select into a noSubmitButton emulator like so:

$mform->addElement('select', 'id_source', get_string('source', 'polyvideo'), $sourcetypes, $attributes);
$mform->addHelpButton('id_source', 'source', 'polyvideo');
$mform->registerNoSubmitButton('id_source');

Then I placed a handler to submit the form on change in my amd module.

I don't think it's going to be up for a best practice award but it works just like a noSubmitButton, skipping validation and reloading the updated form.

I then use the $_POST variable to use the submitted data as a condition in the definition() method to build my form accordingly as such:

$source = '1';
if (isset($_POST['id_source'])) {
    $source = $_POST['id_source'];
}
if ($source === '1') {
    //Using repeat elements to build the form
);
} else {
    if ($source === '2' || $source === '3') {
        //Using conventional addElement to build the form
    }
 }

I know we're not supposed to use $_POST in Moodle, but I haven't found a way to access this data from the definition with the other methods so if anyone can help me on that...

I also have some JS in the background to delete elements dynamically.

I was getting a warning from the browser everytime I changed the selected option:

Leave site?

Changes you made may not be saved.


They were saved though. So I added this little bit of code in JS to get rid of that:

window.onbeforeunload = function(e) {
    e.preventDefault();
    e.stopPropagation();
};

Now I think this is not the cleanest nor most efficent code in a Moodle environement but I'm pretty new to Moodle and I might have missed some fairly obvious better alternatives.

If anyone has concerns, reserve, (anger?) about this code and can think of a more Moodle appropriate way of doing this I'd really like your input!

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In reply to David Poly

Re: Replicating the noSubmitButton behaviour with a select element

by David Poly -

After some more testing, this did not work as well as I thought. The form is bugging because of this little registerNoSubmitButton hack.

I'm trying to find in the Moodle code where this nosubmit condition is used to do a bit of reverse engineering. If someone knows...

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In reply to David Poly

Re: Replicating the noSubmitButton behaviour with a select element

by David Poly -

For anyone interested, I solved my problem with the select registred as a noSubmitButton. The problem was that it was always set, on every submit, even the ones coming from the save buttons. So all user submits were considered of the nosubmit type. Therefore it would never go through validation. So I attached a handler to disable the select on submit. I'm using a hidden input to keep track of all the changes.

Now it finally works as I intended.

Also,

this JS code:

window.onbeforeunload = function(e) {
    e.preventDefault();
    e.stopPropagation();
};


can be swapped with this PHP one:

$mform->disable_form_change_checker();


This was a special case because the module form looks very different in my project depending on the option selected. I feel there's a much simpler way of doing it but for now it'll do and I have a working noSubmit select. 

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