Drupal – Select List “default_value”

Posted on March 29, 2010 by Matt

After beating my head against the desk the past hour, I finally figured out that to set a default value on a plain select list, you need to use "#value" and not "#default_value". So, for example, say I have an array of banks consisting of the bank id and the bank name, like so:

$banks = array(14=>"bank one", 22=>"bank two);

I then want to construct a simple select form element, this WILL NOT work:

$form['drop'] = array(
 #id' => "bank_drop",
 '#type' => 'select',
 '#title' => 'test',
 '#options' => $banks,
 '<span style="color: #ff0000;">#default_value</span>' =&gt; 22  // will NOT work!
);

But this works:

$form['drop'] = array(
  #id' =&gt; "bank_drop",
  '#type' =&gt; 'select',
  '#title' =&gt; 'test',
  '#options' =&gt; $banks,
  '<span style="color: #339966;"><strong>#value</strong></span>' =&gt; 22  // works!
);

This was on Drupal 6.15

Hope that saves someone some headache :)

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12 Responses to "Drupal – Select List “default_value”"

  • By Richard McIntyre April 7, 2010 - 11:53 pm

    You saved me a huge head-ache, thank you!

  • By Paige Cook May 13, 2010 - 8:03 pm

    Thanks, I was beating my head on this one as well. But thankfully it was not for long, thanks to this post :-)

  • By Maduka May 17, 2010 - 7:53 am

    You save my time too. thank you very much dude :)

  • By ethan June 10, 2010 - 11:43 am

    Well, this is nice. But then if a user changes the SELECT box, the new value is ignored on submit.

  • By Matt June 10, 2010 - 12:22 pm

    Don’t know whatcha doin’ there ethan, but all the above is doing is spitting out an html form with an option preselected. Sounds like something else is happening post-submit.

  • By Shannon July 7, 2010 - 12:32 am

    Thanks! This has been the answer to my issue for the last couple of hours… Drupal’s Form API is misleading on this front. It feels like a bug…

  • By Jim April 15, 2011 - 5:41 am

    Wow great answer and yes it saves me a headache and boy was it simple.
    Thanks for your help and advice , Jim

  • By betoss April 27, 2011 - 8:09 am

    thanks! has served me well

  • By Paul Bennett May 3, 2011 - 7:52 pm

    Thanks for posting! This would have taken me ages to track down :)

  • By Martin January 9, 2012 - 1:41 pm

    In Drupal 7, you should use #default_value, because:
    “Description: The value of the form element that will be displayed or selected initially if the form has not been submitted yet. Should NOT be confused with #value, which is a hard-coded value the user cannot change! ”
    (http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/developer–topics–forms_api_reference.html/7#default_value)

  • By Nilamkumar Patel April 9, 2012 - 11:29 am

    Thank you very much. You saved my time and provided very helpful information.

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