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?

Answer 1

To add to what was said:

Dont be afraid of the decorators, you'll be using them lots if you decide to stick with Zend_Form. It's fairly straightforward once you 'get it', unfortunately the docs are weak and playing with it is almost the only way to get there.

The ViewScript and ViewHelper decorators give you lots of power.

Don't be afraid to dig through the source for the different decorators that exist and see how they're doing things (I gained a fair amount of insight comparing the original decorators with the dojo ones).

I think what Sean was suggesting is that you don't need to call form->render, you can use something like this in your viewscript.

 <someHtmlThingy name="blah" value="<?php echo $this->formInstance->getElement('whatever')->getValue(); ?>" />

I worked on one project (pre Zend_Form) where we built sets of validators and used standard viewscripts all the way through. It was a little more work (plumbing for error messages and the like), but not excessive compared to creating elements with Zend_Form.

Answer 2

Skipping out on the form-wide decorators (IE - printing individual elements of the form rather than just relying on the Form's standard View Helper to handle everything) is one way to get a bunch of control back.

Another option is to simply hand-code your form and only use ZF to handle validation and filtering.

Answer 3

Render each element individually in your view - for example

<!-- view script here -->
<form method="POST">
Name: <?php echo $this->myForm->getElement('name')->render(); ?>
some other text between the fields
Birthdate: <?php echo $this->myForm->getElement('birthdate')->render(); ?>
<input type="submit" />
</form>

This maintains the ability to use the Zend_Form view helpers (i.e. to display error messages and maintain the values of the form fields when validation fails) but gives you full customization ability.

If you want to go further, then turn off the default decorators of the individual form elements and then either attach your own to further customize exactly what tags are used (i.e. for error messages and labels) or don't use decorators at all (other than to render the form element itself) and then write all the surrounding HTML manually. Complete customization ability without losing the benefits of Zend_Form, both at the form level and at the view level.

Answer 4

I wrote some sub-classes to Zend_Form and the decorators to make it layout the form in a <table>. It even had some special tricks to do things like make multiple submit buttons show on the same row.

Took a full day of hacking around to get it working. It was written against Zend 1.5.1 so don't know if it will work with the current version, but if you are interested I could probably upload the source somewhere.

This seems to be a very common complaint with Zend Forms.

(I know I'll get poo-poo'd by the CSS purists over using tables to layout forms, and while I agree that CSS is better for most things, I have yet to see good form layout using CSS that doesn't look like a butt-ugly kludge. With tables the forms 'just work' pretty much on every browser I need them to.)

EDIT: Okay, speaking of butt-ugly kludges, I've put my code for producing tabular zend forms in github. Go here to see it. (Because gaoshan88 asked for it.)

Answer 5

Currently we've got the new and shiny Zend\Form which is even more complex than the old component but also much more controllable, encapsulated and powerfull. So, what I said below doesn't apply. The new component is IMHO a huge improvement because it...

• ...gives you full control over how you want to render your form, you need to write a bit more view code but it's worth it
• ...separates data, logics and view to the maximally possible extent
• ...makes use of the HTML5 form elements
• ...gives you many options how you want to put your forms together, e.g. hydration, annotations, etc.

Old answer regarding Zend_Form

I can not really help probably because I have exactly the same problem. I think the Zend_Form decorators are powerful but by far the least programmer friendly and non-intuitive piece of ZF I've seen so far and I've used a major part of the ZF in various projects.

That said I can only give a few hints from my experience:

• filters are easy to use without using form
• most if not all of the things you want to achieve are done with the help of decorators
• I started with small forms and added stuff piece by piece but I don't get some of the stuff I'm doing in some of my forms because the result is based on trial and error (mainly with the decorators)
• I've got information from the zend mailinglist which I couldn't have found anywhere on the web

From the related questions to this on the right hand side it is obvious that there is a lack of comprehensive documentation for Zend_Form especially given it's non-intuitive nature. I would really like to see the ZF guys do something about this as much as I like Zend Framework.

So this answer is probably just to let you know that you're not the only one having the this problem.

---

or alternatively you could use jedi mind tricks of course!

Answer 6

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.