background top

Drupal – Import data into nodes and content types

Written by Noah | Posted in Devit! | 4 Comments »
February 9th, 2009

Importing data into Drupal can be a bit complicated because of node revisions. The trick is that the data needs to be inserted into the node and the node revisions tables, and the two need to reference each other. This becomes even more complicated when using custom content types which also need to reference these nodes.

The function insert_node() takes the node title, body, content type (such as ‘page’ or ‘event’), and optionally the date (as a unix timestamp). It uses two global variables for the ids so that you can reference the ‘nid’ and ‘vid’ values for the inserted rows in other functions, as illustrated in the example insert_special_node().

function insert_node($title, $type, $body, $date = '')
{
	global $insert_id, $insert_revision_id; //nid and vid

	if ($date == '')
	{
		$sql = 'INSERT INTO node (title, type, uid, created, changed) VALUES (\'' . $title . '\', \'' . $type . '\', 1, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), UNIX_TIMESTAMP())';
	} else {
		$sql = 'INSERT INTO node (title, type, uid, created, changed) VALUES (\'' . $title . '\', \'' . $type . '\', 1, ' . $date . ', ' . 	$date . ')';
	}

	$result = db_query($sql);
	$insert_id = mysql_insert_id();

	$sql = 'INSERT INTO node_revisions (nid, title, uid, body, teaser) VALUES (' . $insert_id . ', \'' . $title . '\', 1, \'' . $body . '\', \'' . $body . '\')';
	$result = db_query($sql);
	$insert_revision_id = mysql_insert_id();

	if ($insert_id > 0)
	{
		$sql = 'UPDATE node SET vid = ' . $insert_revision_id . ' WHERE nid = ' . $insert_id;
		$result = db_query($sql);
	}
}

//example usage of insert_node with a sample content type called 'special'
function insert_special_node()
{
	global $insert_id, $insert_revision_id; //nid and vid
	$content_type = 'special';

	//use mysql_real_escape_string() to clean user text for database insert
	//this is mainly useful when inserting data read from another database query
	$title = mysql_real_escape_string('title');
	$body = mysql_real_escape_string('body text');
	$special_text = mysql_real_escape_string('test');

	insert_node($title, $content_type, $body);

	$sql = 'INSERT INTO content_type_special (vid, nid, field_special_value) VALUES (' . $insert_revision_id . ', ' . $insert_id . ', \'' . $special_text . '\')';

	$result = db_query($sql);
}

Noah

Noah believes that most of the world's problems can be solved with a level head and good software. Though experienced with a number of programming languages, he leans towards opensource because of his belief that knowledge and the tools to express oneself creatively should be freely accessible to everyone.

Drupal – Replace node link text with image on view

Written by Noah | Posted in Devit! | 2 Comments »
February 9th, 2009

Drupal Views are great for their flexibility and ease of use. It’s often useful to output a teaser with a ‘read more’ link back to the node. Somtimes we need to link to a node from an image instead of text. Drupal doesn’t provide an option for an image link but it’s pretty simple to override the template file. The code below will replace the link text with an image.

Create a new php file in your themes folder with the name of the field view you want to override. In most cases, the name will contain view-node. You can see the theming information by going into the view, and clicking Theme: Information under Basic Settings.
ie. views-view-field–front-blocks–view-node.tpl.php

//output image link instead of text
$field_text = $field->options['text'];
$image_file = '/images/but_' . strtolower($field_text) . '.gif';
$field_image = '<img src="/' . path_to_theme() . $image_file . '" alt="'
. $field_text . '" border="0" />';
$new_output = str_replace($field_text, $field_image, $output);

print $new_output;

Noah

Noah believes that most of the world's problems can be solved with a level head and good software. Though experienced with a number of programming languages, he leans towards opensource because of his belief that knowledge and the tools to express oneself creatively should be freely accessible to everyone.