I needed to remove the default “-None-“/”-Select-” option that Drupal’s Form API adds to “select” form elements. Let’s take an example. Consider the following “select” element definition for a form:

$element = array (
			'#type' => 'select',
			'#options' => array (
							1 => 'Very poor',
							2 => 'Not that bad',
							3 => 'Average',
							4 => 'Good',
							5 => 'Perfect',
						),
			'#required' => TRUE,
			'#title' => 'Rating',
		);

It looks like the image on the right when rendered. Notice the additional “-Select-” option that Drupal added for data entry. I did not want that option to appear on the data entry form.

Some studying of Drupal docs and searching did not threw up anything. But I was able to achieve what I needed with some testing. Here’s what I did.

I added an ‘#after_build’ method for the form element like below:

$element = array (
			'#type' => 'select',
			'#options' => array (
							1 => 'Very poor',
							2 => 'Not that bad',
							3 => 'Average',
							4 => 'Good',
							5 => 'Perfect',
						),
			'#required' => TRUE,
			'#title' => 'Rating',
			'#after_build' => array('_eventbook_get_rating_widget_after_build'),
		);

And in the ‘#after_build’ method, unsetted the non-desired option from the ‘#options’ array:

{syntaxhighlighter brush: php;fontsize: 100; first-line: 1; }function _eventbook_get_rating_widget_after_build ($element, &$form_state) {
//Remove the default option.
unset($element[‘#options’][”]);

return ($element);
}{/syntaxhighlighter}

It was easy in the end, but would have been more useful if Drupal provided an attribute to prevent this default option from being added automatically.