Soft­ware note: Pods CMS Ver­sion 1.7.3 / WP 2.8.4

Doc­u­men­ta­tion: http://pods.uproot.us/codex/helpers

What are Input Helpers

An Input Helper lets you com­pletely cus­tomize the appear­ance of any input field… when adding new data contents.

In plain n00b Eng­lish: as an exam­ple, the default field “name” I had it to store last names, and a sep­a­rate col­umn to store first names (fname). The prob­lem of that would be when you’re using Bi-directional rela­tion­ship PICK col­umn to another Pod (let’s call this: Per­son) is you can only relate one of the columns, not both First Name and Last Name. So if you use the PICK col­umn the “name”; which stores the Last Names, and with the last name like John­son – you prob­a­bly can’t tell which John­son that is. Input Helpers can grab and dis­play the full names for you when you’re adding data. See screen­shot:

How to add a new Input Helper

Cus­tomized Drop­down Input Helper

The fol­low­ing refers back to the exam­ple and screen­shot above where it pulls full names from the “name” and “fname”columns as a PICK col­umn to dis­play as a drop down menu:

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<select class="form pick1 <?php echo $name; ?>">
        <option value="">-- Select one --</option>
<?php
        if (!empty($value))
        {
            foreach ($value as $key => $val)
            {
                $lastname = $val['name'];
                $firstname = $val['firstname'];
                $fullname = $lastname.", ".$firstname;
                $selected = empty($val['active']) ? '' : ' selected';
?>
        <option value="<?php echo $val['id']; ?>"<?php echo $selected; ?>><?php echo $fullname; ?></option>
<?php
            }
        }
?>
    </select>

The cru­cial parts:

<select class="form pick1 <?php echo $name; ?>">

The class “form pick1″ are required by the default CSS unless you don’t care about the CSS. The $name is just an column’s name to iden­tify the column’s name. Just like Dis­play Helper, it passes the $value array for you to manip­u­late. The rest of the codes are very straight for­ward to read through the $value array, make sure that it actu­ally have some­thing in it before read­ing it. Then split it in parts to dis­play. The $select is sim­ply default select what­ever pre­vi­ous selected when you are brows­ing exist­ing con­tent. If you’re adding new con­tent, it is default to “–Select one–”. The very last part of this script is just sim­ply dis­play­ing each option, giv­ing each of them their unique row ID, then finally dis­play­ing the full names.

Another one I ran into was when I want to do a Multi PICK col­umn, such as peo­ple who belong to a Dojo or Fed­er­a­tion. See below:

I ref­er­enced the code above, with the help of Fire­Bug, this saved the day:

Cus­tomized Multi PICK Col­umn Input Helper

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<div class="form pick <?php echo $name; ?>">
<?php
        if (!empty($value))
        {
            foreach ($value as $key => $val)
            {
                $lastname = $val['name'];
                $firstname = $val['firstname'];
                $fullname = $lastname.", ".$firstname;
                $active= empty($val['active']) ? '' : ' active';
?>
       <div class="option<?php echo $active; ?>" value="<?php echo $val['id']; ?>"><?php echo $fullname ; ?></div>
<?php
            }
        }
?>
</div>

As you’ve noticed, there are only minor dif­fer­ences between the two. The dif­fer­ences are “div” instead of “select”, $active, and the very last line (line 12). Obvi­ously the very last line is the default CSS that used by Pods CMS for Multi PICK columns, unless you want some­thing different.

Using the helpers

Sim­ply click on the pencil/Edit icon of the col­umn, and choose the helper. Like this:

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll update this sec­tion if I learn more.

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