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Given that in PHP5 objects are said to be passed by reference automatically, are there reasons why one must not pass an object through forms ('programmatically')? I hope to create acceptable persistence through using $form_state for use with AJAX or form submit handlers. I've tried the following and it works (but I don't want to be doing something in poor practice/ that might get blocked).

$foo = new stdClass();
$foo->bar = 'foobar';

$form['foo-bar'] = array(
    '#type' => 'value',
    '#value' => $foo,
);

Which then appears in $form_state when the following element triggers an AJAX request

$form['numbers_required'] = array(
    '#type' => 'textfield',
    '#title' => t('Numbers needed'),
    '#ajax' => array(
        'callback' => 'numbers_required_callback',
        'wrapper' => 'numbers_remaining',
    ),
);

Furthermore, the following passage from the drupal_build_form() documentation suggests I might have to set the form 'cache' property to TRUE. Perhaps for others this is the case if they aren't using an AJAX callback. Given that I am, I assume I can ignore this, but thought others might find it useful to know.

cache: If set to TRUE the original, unprocessed form structure will be cached, which allows the entire form to be rebuilt from cache. A typical form workflow involves two page requests; first, a form is built and rendered for the user to fill in. Then, the user fills the form in and submits it, triggering a second page request in which the form must be built and processed. By default, $form and $form_state are built from scratch during each of these page requests. Often, it is necessary or desired to persist the $form and $form_state variables from the initial page request to the one that processes the submission. 'cache' can be set to TRUE to do this. A prominent example is an Ajax-enabled form, in which ajax_process_form() enables form caching for all forms that include an element with the #ajax property. (The Ajax handler has no way to build the form itself, so must rely on the cached version.) Note that the persistence of $form and $form_state happens automatically for (multi-step) forms having the 'rebuild' flag set, regardless of the value for 'cache'.

1 Answer 1

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Objects are 'passed by reference' in the context of being passed to a function in a single page request.

Once the page has reloaded (e.g. when you submit your form), the memory for the original object is freed and it's impossible to maintain a reference to it (at least with standard PHP to the best of my knowledge).

You can keep a copy of the object (which is what Drupal does), and instantiate a version of it on the next page, one that has exactly the same characteristics as the original even, but it's not a reference to it.

What you're doing is absolutely fine, but if you're worried about changes being made to the object after it's been attached to a form, but before it's been submitted, then you should keep hold of the object's identifier instead, and use whatever helper function is available to re-load that object in the submission process. That would be safest I think.

But if your class is dumb, and doesn't have DB persistence/unique identifiers/something that's going to be changed by some other part of the system, then just add it as a value as you're doing already.

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