Create content in Drupal based on options in a drop down - drupal

Question

I am working on a Drupal site that needs to have a 'careers' page. I have a list of twenty or so jobs, and 30 or so locations where these jobs may be available.
What I am looking to do is make it so, when a job becomes available, all that needs to be done is the user selects the job title and the location where it is available and it will create the posting with the job description and other info I have along with the info for that location.
Another hurtle I am running into is making it so I can have multiple instances... ex. If the same job is available at two or more locations.
I have been trying to wrap my mind around how I am going to make this work and am coming up blank. If anyone has an idea to point me in the right direction, it would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Sounds like a pretty common use case; if it was me I'd approach it like this:
Create a 'Job' content type
Add a new 'Location' Vocabulary
Add a term reference field on the 'Job' content type to the 'Location' vocabulary, with unlimited values (or the maximum no. of locations you want to allow per job).
Create a custom form for your admins, something like:
function MYMODULE_add_job_form($form, &$form_state) {
$form['title'] = array(
'#type' => 'textfield',
'#title' => t('Title'),
'#maxlength' => 255,
'#required' => TRUE
);
// Load the vocabulary (the machine name might be different).
$vocabulary = taxonomy_vocabulary_machine_name_load('location');
// Get the terms
$terms = taxonomy_get_tree($vocabulary->vid);
// Extract the top level terms for the select options
$options = array();
foreach ($terms as $term) {
$options[$term->tid] = $term->name;
}
$form['locations'] = array(
'#type' => 'select',
'#title' => t('Locations'),
'#options' => $options,
'#multiple' => TRUE,
'#required' => TRUE
);
$form['submit'] = array(
'#type' => 'submit',
'#value' => t('Add job')
);
return $form;
}
Create a custom submit handler for the form to add the new node programatically:
function MYMODULE_add_job_form_submit($form, &$form_state) {
$location_tids = array_filter($form_state['values']['locations']);
$node = new stdClass;
$node->type = 'job';
$node->language = LANGUAGE_NONE;
node_object_prepare($node);
$node->title = $form_state['values']['title'];
$node->field_location_term_ref[LANGUAGE_NONE] = array();
foreach ($location_tids as $tid) {
$node->field_location_term_ref[LANGUAGE_NONE][] = array(
'tid' => $tid
);
}
node_save($node);
$form_state['redirect'] = "node/$node->nid";
}
You'll need to add a page callback for that form obviously, and there'll likely be some small changes you'll need to make (names of fields etc), but it should give you a good starting point. You'll also need to load the location taxonomy terms at some point to extract the description info you mentioned...you can use taxonomy_term_load() to do that.