Generating forms from the database

I'm trying to teach myself Drupal and I've f开发者_JS百科ound something I can't find any tutorials for.

I am trying to generate a form, with a dynamic number of text fields, to populate and edit the contents of my custom table. In regular PHP I would achieve this with:

$count = '0';
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array ($result) {
  echo "<input type='text' name='title_row".$count."' value='".$row['title']."'>"
  $count = $count +1;
}

Can someone point me to something that'll show me how to do that in Drupal (and processing the submited data)?

Thanks

Check the forms API reference and the Form API Quickstart Guide for this.

A simple version of your example would look something like the following:

/**
 * Form builder function - creates definition of form
 */
function yourModule_table_edit_form($form_state) {
  $form = array();
  // TODO: Add code/query to populate $result, using the 
  // Drupal DAL functions, e.g.:
  $result = db_query('SELECT * FROM {your_table}');
  while ($row = db_fetch_array($result) {
    // Create one textfield per row
    // NOTE: assumes content of title column can be used as an array index
    $form[$row['title']] = array(
      '#type' => 'textfield',
      '#title' => $row['title'],
      '#default_value' => $row['value'], // NOTE: Just assumed the column name
      '#size' => 60, // Adjust as needed
      '#maxlength' => 60, // Adjust as needed
      // NOTE: more options for input element definition available - check the API docs
    );
  }
  $form['submit'] = array(
    '#type' => 'submit',
    '#value' => t('Save'),
  );

  return $form;
}

/**
 * Form submit function
 */
function yourModule_table_edit_form_submit($form, &$form_state) {
  foreach ($form_state['values'] as $row_title => $value) {
    // TODO: Do something with the submitted values
  }
}

(NOTE: Untested code, beware of typos and other errors)

To prepare the form for output, you'd call drupal_get_form('yourModule_table_edit_form').