CODEWITHSUNDEEP
zend-frameworkzend-formzend-form-element
axiom82
axiom82

Reputation: 632

How can I get the Zend_Form object via the Zend_Form_Element child

I've built a Zend_Form_Decorator_Input class which extends Zend_Form_Decorator_Abstract, so that I could customize my form inputs -- works great. I ran into a problem in the decorate class, in trying to get the form name of the element, so as to built a unique id for each field (in case there are multiple forms with identical field names).

There is no method like this: Zend_Form_Element::getForm(); It seems Zend_Form_Decorator_Abstract doesn't have this ability either. Any ideas?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 100

Answers (1)

Moe
Moe

Reputation: 2730

I don't think changing the id from the decorator is the right approach. At the time the decorator is called the element already has been rendered. Thus changing the id would have no effect to the source code. Additionally, as you already have pointed out, the relation between a form and its elements is unidirectional, i.e. (to my best knowledge) there is no direct way to access the form from the element.

So far the bad news.

The good news is, that there actually is a pretty easy solution to your problem: The Zend_Form option elementsBelongTo. It prevents that the same ID is assigned to two form elements that have the same name but belong to different forms:

    $form1 = new Zend_Form(array('elementsBelongTo' => 'form1'));
    $form1->addElement('Text', 'text1');

    $form2 = new Zend_Form(array('elementsBelongTo' => 'form2'));
    $form2->addElement('Text', 'text1');

Although both forms have a text field named 'text1', they have different ids: 'form1-text1' and 'form2-text1'. However, there is a major drawback to this: This also changes the name elements in such a way that they are in the format formname[elementname]. Therefore $this->getRequest()->getParam('formname') will return an associative array containing the form elements.

Upvotes: 1

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