hook_menu issues

Question

I have a hook menu

$items['node/%/delete'] = array(
        'title' => 'Delete',
        'load arguments' => array(3),
        'description' => 'Confirm the action.',
        'page callback' => 'drupal_get_form',
        'page arguments' => array('_mymodule_delete', 1),
        'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
        'weight' => -4,
    );
return $items;

What do I need to do to make sure the following function gets to work (and the variables get their values):

function _mymodule_delete ($form, $form_state, $node) {
...
}

In orther words, how do I get values in the three arguments given ( $form , $form_state and $node )

Answer 1

EDIT

I'll have another go...

The only argument(s) you need to pass to drupal_get_form , other than the name of the form itself, are arguments specific to that form function; $form and $form_state are automatically added for you. So if you want to call a form with a signature of _mymodule_delete($form, $form_state, $node) you would use this code:

$form = drupal_get_form('_mymodule_delete', $the_node);

When you apply this to the menu router, all you're looking to do is pass the loaded $node through as an argument to drupal_get_form in the same way. Your router item would look like this:

$items['node/%node/delete'] = array(
  'title' => 'Title',
  'page callback' => 'drupal_get_form',
  'page arguments' => array('_mymodule_delete', 1),
  'access arguments' => array('access content'),
  'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
  'weight' => -4,
);    

Your original example is missing the access arguments / access callback attribute which would make your page inaccessible (403 status) so I've added in the 'standard' access arguments of access content . You'll probably want to change this for your own needs.

The string node/%node/delete (the router path) and the page arguments array are the bits you're probably interested in here. When you want to pass an argument from the URL to a callback function you simply include it's 'index' as one of the page arguments. This index comes from a zero-based array of the router path when split by the separator ( / ).

In this example the three parts of the path are:

0 => 'node',
1 => '%node',
2 => 'delete'

As the variable element of the path is in index position 1 , that's the number we pass to the page arguments array.

Just to make it a little more complicated, the variable passed in through the path can also be passed to a load function before it's passed to the page callback function. For some reason the naming convention in Drupal is that a function with the name of the variable with _load appended to it will be the name of the function called.

So in this case, node_load is called. If your router path was, for example, books/%book then a function called book_load would be called to prepare the variable to be passed to the page callback function.

The load function is optional, if your path was node/%/delete then the argument passed to your form callback would be the exact string (in this case a node ID) from the URL.

I'm sure you've seen it but the hook_menu() documentation tries its best to explain all this, I can understand why it would be difficult to comprehend though.

Hope that helps.