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A site I'm working on uses AJAX extensively to lazy load page data and to do Twitter style paging. I'd really like to be able to render the HTML via a template file as it will be easier to code and maintain than building an HTML string in a PHP function.

Is there some way to get the data from the DB and pass it to a theme function that loads a tpl file?

Solution: How do I decide between theme('node', $node) and drupal_render($node->content) for programmatic $node output

$node = node_load($nid);
$node_view = node_view($node);
echo drupal_render($node_view);
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SomethingOn
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1 Answers1

4

Yes, you can.

Drupal 7 AJAX requires a callback that needs to return the form element that has been updated and needs to be returned to the browser, or alternatively, a string containing HTML, or an array of custom Ajax commands.

One of the AJAX commands is ajax_command_html(), which you can use to insert the HTML returned from a theme function using a template.

You could have code similar to the following one:

function mymodule_ajax($form, &$form_state) {
  $form = array();
  $form['changethis'] = array(
    '#type' => 'select',
    '#options' => array(
      'one' => 'one',
      'two' => 'two',
      'three' => 'three',
    ),
    '#ajax' => array(
      'callback' => 'mymodule_ajax_callback',
      'wrapper' => 'replace_div',
     ),
  );

  // This entire form element will be replaced with an updated value.
  $form['html_div'] = array(
    '#type' => 'markup',
    '#prefix' => '<div id="replace_div">',
    '#suffix' => '</div>',
  );
  return $form;
}

function mymodule_ajax_callback($form, $form_state) {
  return theme('mymodule_ajax_output', array());
}

The theme function is defined in hook_theme() as in the following code:

function mymodule_theme($existing, $type, $theme, $path) {
  return array(
    'mymodule_ajax_output' => array(
      'variables' => array(/* the variables that will be passed to the template file */), 
      'template' => 'mymodule-ajax-output',
    ),  
  );
}

 

To notice that the template filename must match the name of the theme function; you can use hyphens where the theme function name uses underscores, but you cannot have a theme function named "foo" that uses "bar" as name of the template file.
The name of the template file reported from hook_theme() doesn't include the extension (".tpl.php") that is added from Drupal when looking for the template file.

apaderno
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  • Thanks for the response! I'll check this out tomorrow :D – SomethingOn Dec 05 '11 at 04:35
  • Unless I'm doing something wrong, the hook_theme() function is creating a fully styled page which is being injected into the DOM instead of just my custom.tpl.php file. Is there some way to run a tpl.php file WITHOUT it theming and entire page? – SomethingOn Dec 05 '11 at 20:50
  • The answer on this page lead me to the correct answer :D http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3886898/how-do-i-decide-between-themenode-node-and-drupal-rendernode-content-f – SomethingOn Dec 05 '11 at 22:57
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    I forgot the AJAX callback can also return a string containing HTML. As for the theme function rendering a complete page, that doesn't depend from the theme function, but from the function calling it. For example, a page callback will render a full Drupal page if uses `return $output;` but it will render only its output if it uses `print $output; exit;`. I have never seen an AJAX callback rendering a full Drupal page, as in most of the cases, it returns a form field, and in that case it works perfectly. If it would happen as you described, none of the pages using an AJAX callback would work. – apaderno Dec 06 '11 at 00:22