Thursday, January 17. 2008

Zend_Form is ready for testing

I've spent the last couple months gathering requirements for the Zend_Form component, building a prototype, creating a composite proposal based on existing proposals and my research, gathering community feedback, and, finally coding the implementation. It's a testament to the value of Test Driven Development that I now have 302 unit tests passing covering the codebase... all in just over a week's time.

So, if you're interested in Zend_Form, now is the time to start testing it. You can grab it from subversion, where you'll find it in the incubator. You can find preliminary documentation on the Framework wiki.

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Posted by Matthew Weier O'Phinney at 15:26 | Comments (13) | Trackbacks (0)

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Hello. I think it's a great component and now I'm testing it on my test site. It is very flexible and allows personalizations.

The only thing I can't do to work is the DisplayGroup. Maybe it's because I'm not an experienced programmer ;-)
#1 Karen Nalbandian on 2008-01-18 17:54 (Reply)
I haven't yet gotten to the DisplayGroup documentation; hopefully once I have, the feature will make more sense. :-)
#1.1 Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Link) on 2008-01-18 22:35 (Reply)
Hello, Matthew! Sorry for my english ;-)

I try to play with ZF-1.5.0PR and Zend_Form. I founded that Zend_Form_Element::getAttribs() method don't return valid attributes. Example:
Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Form');
$form = new Zend_Form(array(
'action' => $this->getRequest()->getBaseUrl(),
'method' => 'post',
'elements' => array(
'test' => array(
'text', array('size' => '50'),
),
'submit' => array(
'submit', array('value' => 'tfdsf'),
),
)
));
$form->getElement('test')->setAttrib('ff', '11');
Zend_Debug::dump($form->getElement('test')->getAttribs());
#2 Hinikato (Link) on 2008-01-29 22:31 (Reply)
Hinikato, this is a known issue in PHP 5.1.x, and there is an issue for it in the Zend Framework bug tracker. I'll be attempting to fix it this week.
#2.1 Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Link) on 2008-01-30 08:02 (Reply)
$form->getElement('test')->setAttrib('ff', '11');
Zend_Debug::dump($form->getElement('test')->getAttribs());
this lines i add after Zend_Debug::dump($form->getElement('test')->getAttribs()) return empty array for size attribute.
#3 Hinikato (Link) on 2008-01-29 22:34 (Reply)
I write simple bug fix:
public function getAttribs()
{
$attribs = array();
foreach (get_object_vars($this) as $property => $value) {
if ($property[0] == '_') {
continue;
}
$attribs[$property] = $value;
}
return $attribs;
}
Is it bug?
#4 Hinikato (Link) on 2008-01-29 22:44 (Reply)
Hi,

In the render method in the Zend_Form class (lines 1672-1684, incubator rev. 7704), I believe line 1681 (concatenation of content within foreach) should be:

$content .= $decorator->render($content);

instead of:

$content = $decorator->render($content);

Haven't tested it though...
#5 Arjan on 2008-01-30 16:12 (Reply)
Arjan, i think this is not the bug. Because decorators change content and return it. You may not has decorators and in that case content will ''.
#5.1 Hinikato (Link) on 2008-01-30 18:45 (Reply)
Hinikato is correct -- decorators modify content, and thus render() does not concatenate. Decorators may choose to append, prepend, or replace the content internally (and often this is configurable by specifying a 'placement' option to the decorator).
#5.2 Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Link) on 2008-01-31 06:37 (Reply)
Matthew, i try to change default elements decorators but this was inconvenient... Zend_Form and Zend_Form_Elements constructors define default decorators and i can't redefine them. I found only one method Zend_Form::setElementDecorators but if i try use it, i can't find method to get $_defaultHelper Zend_Form_Elements property.
Example:
$decorators = array(
array('ViewHelper', array('helper' => ???)), // i can't get $_defaultHelper property
array('Label', array('tag' => 'dt')),
array('HtmlTag', array('tag' => 'dd')),
array('Errors'),
);
$form->setElementDecorators($decorators);
May be best way is take user decorators as constructor parameter and merge them with default decorators (in Zend_Form and Zend_Form_Element to).
#6 Hinikato (Link) on 2008-01-31 23:34 (Reply)
...and this should increase productivity (very little), because I should not remove decorators that I do not want (which defined in constructors and are default).
#6.1 Hinikato (Link) on 2008-01-31 23:41 (Reply)
Hinikato -- you raise some good points, and I'll see if I can address them. Regarding the $_defaultHelper property, if you're using the standard elements, this is a non-issue, as the ViewHelper decorator can also determine the correct view helper based on the element's class name.

BTW, you may want to join the fw-mvc@lists.zend.com mailing list, which I monitor; you can then benefit from the much larger discussion of Zend_Form that has been occurring there.
#6.2 Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Link) on 2008-02-01 08:06 (Reply)
Matthew, thank you ;-)
#7 Hinikato (Link) on 2008-02-02 00:21 (Reply)

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