Ajax Dialogs in Drupal are a good way of presenting content to a user without them having to navigate away from the page they are looking at.
This is useful when presenting a list of items or a link to something like a terms and conditions page. Users can click a link and view the content as a dialog box.
Creating dialogs in Drupal is built into the platform and are powered through the jQuery UI dialog component.
Drupal provides a way to create the following types of dialogs.
- Normal dialogs - The dialog shows on top of the content on the page. It is possible to show multiple dialogs on the page at the same time.
- Modal dialogs - The dialog creates an overlay that disables other elements on the page. Only one modal dialog can be shown on the page at once.
- Off-canvas dialogs - The dialog slides in from edge of the browser window. This is useful if you want to show lots of content and is also a better option for showing dialog boxes on mobile views.
There are a number of ways in which dialogs can be created, but there is very little documentation on the subject.
This article will cover how to create different types dialogs in Drupal and in a few different ways, including how content editors can easily add dialogs into content with little programming knowledge.
Creating Dialogs Using PHP Classes
Ajax dialogs are generated in Drupal using a number of PHP classes. The different classes are used to generate different types of dialog. First, let's look at generating a normal ajax dialog box.