Attaching JS/CSS to forms in Drupal 6

Question

I'm familiar with the process of attaching JavaScript and CSS to specific forms and form items in Drupal 7 using the #attached attribute.

I'm running into an issue which that solves, but unfortunately I'm on a D6 installation.

Basically, drupal_get_form() is being called from the theme layer (in a custom template file). The form it's printing has form_alter hooks which execute drupal_add_js() (and css), but because the drupal_get_form is being called in the theme layer, those JS files are being added too late, and therefore not being included.

What's the best Drupal 6 solution to this problem?

Answer 1

As said in the question, drupal_get_form() is called too late in the page building process for the drupal_add_js() and drupal_add_js() calls to have any effect. Calling drupal_get_form() in the theme layer is usually not an issue, but in this case I'm assuming that in this case it's called in a page-<something>.tpl.php. Becasue of CSS and JS addition happen after the execution of template_preprocess_page() which build the $script, cssand $styles variables.

A simple solution is to call drupal_get_form() from your theme's page template preprocessor and then re-build the $script, css and $styles variables.

function THEME_preprocess_page(&$variables) {
  $form = drupal_get_form('the_form_name');
  $variables['my_form'] = $form;
  $variables['styles']            = drupal_get_css();
  $variables['css']               = drupal_add_css();
  $variables['scripts']           = drupal_get_js();
}

A better solution would be to call drupal_get_form() earlier, from a lower level template (such as node.tpl.php ou user.tpl.php). But the best would be to retrieve the form outside of the theme layer in a page, block, etc. callback function.