Joomla! 1.5 How to create a Select tag through the Joomla Framework

Today I needed to display a list of towns from a database table. Nowhere on the Joomla! documentation could I find an example on how to achieve that, so I had to go figure it out once again.

I have a database table that contains all my towns. First I had to create a query to retrieve the towns and put them in an object list.

The code for that follows.

<?php
$db =& JFactory::getDBO();

$query = 'SELECT `id`,`name` FROM #__town';
$db->setQuery( $query );
$townlist = $db->loadObjectList();
?>

Ok now that I have a list of towns I simply have to use JHTMLSelect.genericlist() to output the HTML code for my select.

The code to do that follows:

<?php
echo JHTML::_('Select.genericlist',$townlist,"town","","id","name",1);
?>

In the code I am simply creating a select from the town list with the options values set as id and the texts set as name (as per the query) . The 1 at the end indicates the selected option. 

If I for example get the selected option from a post/get request, the code will look as follows.

<?php
$selectedId = JRequest::getVar( 'id',0);
echo JHTML::_('Select.genericlist',$townlist,"town","","id","name",$selectedId);
?>

Joomla! 1.5 How to cloak an email through code.

This one I figured out for myself and I am sure you will be able to do the sime... right. :)

Say for example you have a custom field in the database that stores an email and you want to display that email on a page somewhere. You don't really want to allow every spam or virus harvest bot out there to come and grab the email. That is why Joomla! created the cloak function. It just makes sense to protect ppl's emails.

To cloak the email simply enter the following code.

<?php
$email = 'some.email@some.domain';
$emcloaked = JHTML::_('Email.cloak',$email);
echo $emcloaked;
?>

And that is it.