So, the trick was to figure out what pieces I was going to use to build this. Since I am a jQuery fan, I started searching for plugins to make it all work nice. My research dug up the perfect tool: the jQuery Form Population plugin. I know you'll follow the link and read it, but as a quick summary it is a plugin for allowing you to populate values in a form on the client side, meaning in Javascript, instead of the server side, which in this case would be everyone's favourite online whipping-boy PHP.

Once I played around with the plugin (and actually read the documentation) I realized that the simple solution I wanted was at hand. Let me show you what I did:

This is load-defaults.js. It contains functions that I want to use to set the defaults. I think it's pretty self-explanatory. I would like a less-ugly way of implementing what I did in outputDefaultChoices(), so let me know if there is a better way.

Up at the top of that code is where we are setting a bunch of defaults for when the form front-end is initially loaded. The populate plugin accepts JSON containing not only the key-value pairs of form field name and value respectively, but also accepts a bunch of very useful options. 'reset-form':false tells the plugin to not simple reset the form when populating (we might not want to overwrite some existing values). 'identifier':'name' is a cool feature of the plugin that allows you to specify *how* you want the plugin to figure out how to map the field names you sent it already to the form itself. Default is 'id' but much of the existing form did not have id fields for the form fields, so I figured it was less work for me to make the plugin figure it out.

This is the sample configuration file that we distribute with the application to show people how to use it. Look, I even provided instructions at the top on how to use it!

Anyway, if you've been looking for a way to create multiple sets of defaults for your forms, switchable with the click of a button, I hope this code is useful to you.

My employer, XML Team Solutions is looking to hire a "Software Engineer" to replace an outgoing employee. This is not an entry-level position as it requires solid skills in PHP, HTML/CSS/ and knowing how to build some pretty scary SQL queries.

You would be spending your days hanging out on the company IRC channel, doing tasks as assigned which include writing web apps for internal and external use, answering support tickets from our clients and tackling some interesting problems involving large data sets and traffic levels.

XML Team Solutions provides sports data to our clients formatted in XML and offers support tools for dumping that data into a relational database so you could run, for example, a fantasy football site. We collect data from a wide variety of content sources both in North America and Europe, and we have worked with companies like Yahoo!, Google and ESPN. If you're into sports, a good problem solver, and used to working with minimal supervision, this is the job for you. Plus you get to work with me! What could be better?

We're a small company (6 people including myself) so you will often be asked to do non-programming tasks because, well, sometimes somebody's got to do it! I will say that the company feels more like a team than any other place that I've ever worked.

If you're interested, send a resume to me at chris@DIESPAMMERREMOVETHISxmlteam.com. I will only respond to those who are being considered for an interview. DEFINITELY no recruiters or agencies allowed, thanks.

So why am I working for them? Besides the opportunity to continue working from home, they are in the sports data business. They provide data feeds, in XML format using the SportsML standard, and have some pretty impressive clients on board (many subscription-based clients) and some of the upcoming projects sound exciting (two pretty cool baseball-related things). Since I'm a baseball freak, this is right up my alley.

Sounds good, right? Well, not everything is perfect. They don't use CakePHP. . They preferred CodeIgnitor when they needed some framework stuff done. Not that there is anything wrong with CodeIgnitor, as it has it's place. My problem is that I can't keep jumping from framework to framework all the time. My brain gets confused about how to solve things sometimes.