phly, boy, phly (Entries tagged as decorators)

Creating composite elements

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:30:00 -0400

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

<div class="element">
<?php echo $form->dateOfBirth->renderLabel() ?>
<?php echo $this->formText('dateOfBirth[day]', '', array(
'size' => 2, 'maxlength' => 2)) ?>
/
<?php echo $this->formText('dateOfBirth[month]', '', array(
'size' => 2, 'maxlength' => 2)) ?>
/
<?php echo $this->formText('dateOfBirth[year]', '', array(
'size' => 4, 'maxlength' => 4)) ?>
</div>

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!

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Rendering Zend_Form decorators individually

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:28:00 -0400

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.

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From the inside-out: How to layer decorators

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:30:00 -0400

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.

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The simplest Zend_Form decorator

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:30:00 -0400

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.

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