php - Zend Form: How do I make it bend to my will?

Question

I've read the manual many times, I've scoured the posts offered by Google on the subject, I have even bought a couple of books that deal with ZF. Now, why am I still confused?

I can, using Zend_Form, make a form that validates and functions fine. What I cannot do it make a form that looks exactly like I want it to look with the error messages that I want it to have. I want custom buttons, I want funky layouts, I want to insert text in the midst of the form, etc.

Does anyone have a simple way of achieving these sorts of things? Something that makes me feel like the framework is saving me time rather than costing? I could forego Zend Form... make my own form, have its action hit a page to validate and process the posted data and I could do it about as fast as I can type but I really want to "get" this and be able to use it as it was apparently intended.

Any advice? Any simple "how to's" for custom buttons, funky layouts and basic (or rather advanced as there are tons of basic tutorials that skip over the harder issues) "getting things done" with zend form?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/534870/zend-form-how-do-i-make-it-bend-to-my-will

Answer 1

Barrett Conrad's advice is what I would have suggested. Also, keep in mind that you don't need to use a form object to render your form.

One thing you could do is create a form in your view script that has elements with the same name as a form class.

Your HTML form:

<form action="/login/" method="post">
<fieldset>
    <label for="username">Username:</label>
    <input type="text" size="10" name="username" />
    <label for="password">Password:</label>
    <input type="password" size="10" name="password" />
    <input type="submit" />
</fieldset>
</form>

Your class:

class LoginForm extends Zend_Form
{
    public function init()
    {
        $username = $this->createElement('text','username');
        $username->setRequired(true);
        $this->addElement($username);

        $password = $this->createElement('password','password');
        $password->setRequired(true);
        $this->addElement($password);        
    }
}

Your form class reflects your HTML form, each element in your class has its own validators and requirements. Back in your action you can create an instance of your form class and validate your post/get vars against that form:

$form = new LoginForm();
if ($this->_request->isPost()) {
    if ($form->isValid($this->_request->getParams())) {
        // do whatever you need to do
    } else {
        $this->view->errors = $form->getMessages();
    }
}

You can display the the error messages at the top of your form in one group, using this method.

This is a basic example, but it allows you to have total control over the presentation of your form without spending the time to learn to use decorators. Much of the strength of Zend_Form is in its validation and filtering properties, in my opinion. This gives you that strength. The main draw back to a solution like this is that your view script HTML form can become out-of-sync with your form class.