How to hide a field in a Drupal form

Question

I have a specific content type in drupal6. I want to implement a hook, which hides the body field of that content type from the add form, but not from the edit form. How can I do that?

Answer 1

You can use hook_form_alter. Which you can programmatically alter the contents of the form api build. This gives you the full $form array of which you can simply unset($form['the_field_you_dont_want']); .

But the easier way to get rid of the body field is in the edit content type there is a field labelled 'Body field label:' just leave this blank and the body field will be omitted.

Answer 2

unset seems to destroy the value as well, as does the #access property. I just use this to hide a field (in this case a reference if it was preset using the URL:

$form['field_reference']['#prefix'] = "<div class='hide'>";
$form['field_reference']['#suffix'] = "</div>";

Answer 3

The solution found here https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/11237/hide-field-in-node-add-page works great for me. Here I am repeating moon.watcher's solution:

function test_remove_filed_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state) {

    if (arg(0) == 'node' && arg(1) == 'add') {
    $form['field_test']['#access'] = 0;
    }

}

The disadvantage of using unset() is that it will entirely remove the field and you can't further on like, for example, on node presave. In my case, I just wanted to remove the field from the form on the first moment, but I wanted to populate it later on, prior to saving the node. The solution on the link above works perfect for me for this reason.

Answer 4

Did you implement the content type within a module (using hook_node_info)? If so, set the has_body attribute to false.