Shipping quote: the shipping we will use a random generated number between $100 and $200. Display on the page somewhere the shipping amount, subtotal and then the grand total. Thx what's the right way in drupal to create reports? i was hoping to use a view but am not having much luck.

My goal is to create a table of rows containing three fields: user name, location, sum of volunteer hours. I know crystal reports and mssql reporting services and i was hoping to find a similar kind of thing for drupal. Is there a framework, examples, or a module to help with this, or do i need to write a custom module implementing the views_alter_sql hook to get the desired data for each report? edit: i ended up getting it to work with birt reports, which gave a lot more power than views could allow. Created on november 20, 2004. a drupal site can have three kinds of modules the 3 cs:

core

contributed

custom

this section of the developing for drupal handbook will help you to write your own modules and to collaborate with the community on shared projects. Before you begin to write your own modules you should also become familiar with the following sections of the developing for drupal handbook: for a collection of useful materials for module developers, see module development with drupal. Once you feel comfortable enough to start digging in, you'll want to identify which version of drupal you are targeting with your custom module. Individual situations will dictate the choice, but whichever one you choose, it will then dictate the link to the right under creating drupal x modules that you will then follow, the versions of drupal core and the examples modules that you will download git clone , and the version of the api documentation that you will reference once you run out of tutorials and community documentation to follow. The block that we add will simply display a list of all of the currently enabled modules on our drupal installation. We are going to divide this task of building a new module into the three parts: create a new module folder and module files work with the block subsystem write automated tests using the simpletest framework included in drupal we are going to proceed in that order for the sake of simplicity.

One might object that, following agile development processes, we ought to begin by writing our tests. agile software development is a particular methodology designed to help teams of developers effectively and efficiently build software. While drupal itself has not been developed using an agile process, it does facilitate many of the agile practices. To learn more about agile, visit however, our goal here is not to exemplify a particular methodology, but to discover how to write modules. It is easier to learn module development by first writing the module, and then learn how to write unit tests. It is easier for two reasons: simpletest in spite of its name is the least simple part of this article.

We will need to become acquainted with the apis we are going to use in development before we attempt to write tests that assume knowledge of those apis. In regular module development, though, you may certainly choose to follow the tdd approach of writing tests first, and then writing the module. How easy? easy enough that over 5,0 modules have been developed, and many drupal developers are even php novices! in fact, the code in this article is an illustration of how easy module coding can be.

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We are going to create our first module with only one directory and two small files. However, there is one minor ambiguity that ought to be cleared up at the outset, a drupal module has two names: a human readable name: this name is designed to be read by humans, and should be one or a couple of words long. For example, one of the most popular drupal modules has the human readable name views. A less popular but perhaps more creatively named drupal 6 module has the human readable name eldorado superfly. It can be composed of lower case and upper case letters, digits, and the underscore character using upper case letters in machine names is frowned upon, though.

The machine names of the above two modules are views and eldorado_superfly. Because of the convention of similar naming, the two names can usually be used interchangeably, and most of the time it is not necessary to specifically declare which of the two names we are referring to. In cases where the difference needs to be made as in the next section , the authors will be careful to make it. One of the less intuitive aspects of drupal development is the filesystem layout. Where do we put a new module? the obvious answer would be to put it in the /modules directory alongside all of the core modules.

As obvious as this may seem, the /modules folder is not the right place for your modules. It is reserved for core drupal modules only, and will be overwritten during upgrades. The second, far less obvious place to put modules is in /sites/all/modules.

This is the location where all unmodified add on modules ought to go, and tools like drush a drupal command line tool will download modules to this directory. However, as of this writing, /sites/all/modules is not the recommended place to put custom modules unless you are running a multi site configuration and the custom module needs to be accessible on all sites. The current recommendation is to put custom modules in the /sites/default/modules directory, which does not exist by default. One is that standard add on modules are stored elsewhere, and this separation makes it easier for us to find our own code without sorting through clutter. There are other benefits such as the loading order of module directories , but none will have a direct impact on us.

This follows drupal best practices, and also makes it easy to find our modules as opposed to all of the other add on modules. the one disadvantage of storing all custom modules in /sites/default/modules appears only under a specific set of circumstances. If you have drupal configured to serve multiple sites off of one single instance, then the /sites/default folder is only used for the default site. What this means, in practice, is that modules stored there will not be loaded at all for other sites. In such cases, it is generally advised to move your custom modules into /sites/all/modules/custom.