Using ViewScript Decorator on Nested Subforms (Zend Form)

Question

I want to use a view script to render my zend form as it seems to be the best way to control the layout/design of the form while still using the Zend_Elements classes.

From the view script, I render the element with $this->element->getElement('elementName') .

I'm having problems with the names of the elements. This is actually a sub-form inside a sub-form inside a form.

When I used the FormElements decorators , the fully qualified name of the elements was form[subForm][subForm][element] , which was good. Wehn I moved to the viewScript decorators, it changed to subForm[subForm][element].

I understood that I need to use the PrepareElements decorator to fix this, but this caused the name to change form[subForm][form][subForm][subForm][elements] (it doubled the first two names in the start).

Any ideas how I should handle this?

Thanks.

UPDATE: I tried to debug PrepareElements and I really don't understand what is doing. It seems like it works ok in the first iteration, but then it adds again the form[subform] prefix when running on one of the middle subforms.

When I'm not using the PrepareElements decorator, I'm just missing the "form" prefix in the names (i.e., instead of form[subForm][element], I get only subForm[element]).

May be I can just fix this somehow?

I tried to change the belongsTo but that only replaced the "subForm" prefix .

It actually seems like what is missing is a belongsTo method on the subForm.

Again, this is all because of the ViewScript decorator. It works fine with the FormElements decorators.

UPDATE 2: Just to clarify, I wouldn't mind this name change, but it causes my fields to not populate when I call form->populate .

Edit: I think that I've narrowed the problem to this: when I get my values back in setDefaults, they are ordered like this:

array(
\"formElements1-name\" => value1... \"subFormName\" => array(
\"parentFormName\" => array(
\"subFormName\" => subForm-values-array
)
)

... The main problem here is the "parentFormName" => "subFormNAme".. what does it repeat itself? I'm already in the main form. I'm guessing this is caused because I've set the setElementsBelongTo(formName[subFormName]) , but if I wouldn't do that, then I would get my subform values completely separate from the form,

i.e. values array = array( \"formName\" => array( formValues ), \"subFormNAme\" => array( subFormValues )

, while I exepct it to be

array(
formName => array(
subFormNAme => values-array
)
)...

Is it even possible to make this work?

Answer 1

Are you just trying to output your form using <?php echo $this->form; ?> from your view script?

That works well for simple forms, but for my more complex forms I tend to render each element individually but don't need to use ViewScript decorator on each individual element to do this. Just try something like this from your view script:

<div class="form">
    <fieldset>
        <legend>Some Form Name</legend>
        <form action="<?php echo $this->escape($this->form->getAction()) ?>"
              method="<?php echo $this->escape($this->form->getMethod()) ?>"
              enctype="multipart/form-data">

            <?php echo $this->form->id; // render the id element here ?>

            <div class="half">
                <?php echo $this->form->name; // render the user name field here ?>
            </div>
            <div class="half">
                <?php echo $this->form->description; // render the description element here ?>
            </div>
            <div class="clear"></div>

            <div class="half">
                <?php echo $this->form->address1; // render the address ?>
            </div>
            <div class="half">
                <?php echo $this->form->address2; // render address2 ?>
            </div>
            <div class="clear"></div>

            <div class="third">
                <?php echo $this->form->zip; // render zip code ?>
            </div>
            <div class="third">
                <?php echo $this->form->city; // render city ?>
            </div>
            <div class="third">
                <?php echo $this->form->state; // render state ?>
            </div>
            <div class="clear"></div>

            <div class="half">
                <?php echo $this->form->country; // render country ?>
            </div>
            <div class="clear"></div>

            <?php echo $this->form->submit; ?>

        </form>
    </fieldset>
</div>

That is how I do most of my forms because I want to have some elements take up half the width and others the full width.

Surprisingly, the reference guide doesn't tell you that you can do this. I seem to remember a page about it in the past but cannot find it now. When I got started with Zend Framework, I thought the only way I could get my form to output exactly how I wanted was to create complex decorators, but that is not the case.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a great blog post on rendering Zend_Form decorators individually which explains what I did above. I hope they add this to the first page of Zend Form because that was discouraging to me at first. The fact is, 90% of my forms render elements individually instead of just echo'ing the form itself.

Note: To stop ZF from enclosing my form elements in the dt and dd tags, I apply this decorator to all of my standard form elements. I have a base form class that I extend all of my forms from so I don't have to repeat this everywhere. This is the decorator for the element so I can use tags to enclose my elements.

public $elementDecorators = array(
    'ViewHelper',
    'Errors',
    array('Description', array('tag' => 'p',    'class' => 'description')),
    array('HtmlTag',     array('tag' => 'div', 'class' => 'form-div')),
    array('Label',       array('class' => 'form-label', 'requiredSuffix' => '*'))
);

For my submit buttons I use

public $buttonDecorators = array(
    'ViewHelper',
    array('HtmlTag', array('tag' => 'div', 'class' => 'form-button'))
);

Answer 2

The current solution is to use the PrepareElements decorator on the subforms with one change - remove the recursive call in the PrepareElements code. Also, no "setElementsBelongTo" is required.

This seem to generate the correct names and ids.