Module development and code questions

Hi everyone.. I would like to ask how can i get the value inputted by the user in a textarea, textfield and if its a select box what value is selected..

i have this select box where the user selects how many successful work his done for the day and with that selection made i will output the number of textarea needed for each work..

Example: by default is 1. if the user chooses 2 then there will be two textareas.

does anybody know the javascript for this or ajax maybe..

i would really appreciate your help...

thanks

I don't know whether this would be the best place to seek help...

I have been trying to set up a 5.1 installation profile that automatically inserts several base pages into the new Drupal site. I started by copying the MySQL dump commands into db_query() calls, but I soon found that didn't really work, since I didn't understand how all the 52 MySQL tables interacted, and which commands I needed to run, and which not.

I guess I could take a complete dump of the Drupal database and cycle through every line and wrap it in db_query, but I wonder whether there is a better way?

Hi everyone..

I am having a problem on my select box display. im trying to create a module that has a date started field and a date finish field. i want to display the select box side by side..

example: "box" month / "box" day / "box" year

but when it displays.. it goes like this.. "box"
month

"box"
day

Does anyone know how I could go about adding a filter to views that sorts by length of text? (node title field in this case)

I've searched up and down and couldn't find any hints on how to go about this.

How might one easily turn the "LI" style LIST of on line Users into a Comma separated list of users?

I have read all the documentation for the Views module and have even done some poking around the codebase, but for the life of me, can't figure out how to do this:

I have a module which creates albums of images. I have created an AJAX mechanism for sorting the images within album and a callback that saves the node id and order id of the images once they've been moved. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to use that order table to order the images upon presenting the view of the album. I've added a hook_views_tables function (see below) and have tried to programatically use $view->sort (see below) to modify the query that gets built as part of views_build_view. Unfortunately, the query that view builds doesn't join the order table with the nodes table.

Why not? What am I missing? If I look in the view tables, nothing is saved there? I assume that's a symptom of my follow.

function acidfree_views_tables() {
    $table = array(
        'name' => 'acidfree_order',
        'join' => array(
            'left' => array(
                'table' => 'node',
                'field' => 'nid'
            ),
            'right' => array(
                'field' => 'nid'
            )
        )
    );
    $tables['acidfree_order'] = $table;
    return $tables;
}


$view->sort[0] = array(
'vid' => $view->vid,