Phly, boy, phly
the weblog and site of Matthew Weier O'Phinney

In my last post on decorators, I had an example that showed rendering a "date of birth" element:

This has prompted some questions about how this element might be represented as a Zend_Form_Element, as well as how a decorator might be written to encapsulate this logic. Fortunately, I'd already planned to tackle those very subjects for this post!

In the previous installment of this series on Zend_Form decorators, I looked at how you can combine decorators to create complex output. In that write-up, I noted that while you have a ton of flexibility with this approach, it also adds some complexity and overhead. In this article, I will show you how to render decorators individually in order to create custom markup for your form and/or individual elements.

This marks the second in an on-going series on Zend_Form decorators.

You may have noticed in the previous installment that the decorator's render() method takes a single argument, $content. This is expected to be a string. render() will then take this string and decide to either replace it, append to it, or prepend it. This allows you to have a chain of decorators -- which allows you to create decorators that render only a subset of the element's metadata, and then layer these decorators to build the full markup for the element.

Let's look at how this works in practice.

I've been seeing ranting and general confusion about Zend_Form decorators (as well as the occasional praises), and thought I'd do a mini-series of blog posts showing how they work.