Hidding a form element before printing

Question

I want to print only bits of a very big form, my first approach was as follow:

function THEME_preprocess_user_profile(&$variables) {
    global $user;
    $account = user_load($user ->uid);  
    $variables['user_edit']  = drupal_get_form('user_profile_form', $account);
    $variables['user_edit']['field_about_me'] = 'invisible';
    .....
    $variables['user_edit']['field_some_filed'] = 'invisible';

}

This does work to hide certain element, the problem is that there is way more elements i want to hide than elements i want to show, so this process can be tedious..

Would anyone think of a better way to do so ?

UPDATE : Ideally i'd like to have a function similar to drupal_get_form, but that instead only return a targeted element.

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

Either save the elements you wish to print in temporary var, hide all (or unset them), then reassign the saved elements to $vairables array, or use DS module.

Answer 2

if you want to hide elements the appropiate way is to set the #access attribute on each element to FALSE, using a hook_form_alter()

'#access'

Used by: All elements and forms

Description: Whether the element is accessible or not; when FALSE, the element is not rendered and the user submitted value is not taken into consideration.

Values: TRUE or FALSE.

Source: http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/developer--topics--forms_api_reference.html/7#access

Answer 3

Remember #access will not consider the particular elements in submit process. we can set #access to false if we want to totally ignore the fields.

In case you want to hide the field with a default value. just pass attribute in form alter:

$form[fldname]['#attributes']['style'][] = 'display:none;';