Raza Mehdi's Blog

Hello Everyone!

I just started work on my Real Estate Management System (REMS). Its first form is a booking search form for properties available for rent. The form consisted of fields like location, start & end booking dates,  no.of bedrooms, price range etc. Typically any element defined inside a Zend_Form class is wrapped like this on a view file:

<dl id="ELEMENTID">ELEMENT LABEL</dl>
<dd>ELEMENT</dd>

I wanted to get rid of this default styling, so after reading the documentation i achieved it by writing this code in the init() function of my Zend_Form class after defining all the form elements:

$this->setElementDecorators(array('ViewHelper'));

I also converted my Login Form’s layout to a table-based also. Here is the code for that class:

<?php

class Form_Login extends Zend_Form {

public function init() {

$username = $this->createElement('text','username');
$username->setLabel('Username');
$username->setRequired(true);
$username->setAttrib('size','20');
$this->addElement($username);

$password = $this->createElement('password','password');
$password->setLabel('Password');
$password->setRequired(true);
$password->setAttrib('size','20');
$this->addElement($password);

$submit = $this->createElement('submit','submit',array('label'=>'Login'));
$this->addElement($submit);

// Code for Custom Decorators here ...
$username->setDecorators(array(
'ViewHelper',
'Errors',
array(array('data'=>'HtmlTag'), array('tag' =>'td','class' =>'element')),
array('Label',array('tag'=>'td')),
array(array('row'=>'HtmlTag'), array('tag'=>'tr')),
));

$password->setDecorators(array(
'ViewHelper',
'Errors',
array(array('data'=>'HtmlTag'), array('tag'=>'td', 'class'=>'element')),
array('Label', array('tag'=>'td')),
array(array('row'=>'HtmlTag'), array('tag'=>'tr')),
));

$submit->setDecorators(array(
'ViewHelper',
array(array('data'=>'HtmlTag'),array('tag'=>'td','class'=>'element')),
array('Label',array('tag'=>'td')),
array(array('row'=>'HtmlTag'),array('tag'=>'tr')),
));

$this->setDecorators(array(
'FormElements',
array('HtmlTag',array('tag'=>'table')),
'Form',
));

}

}

?>

I hope this helps everyone out. Also checkout this great article Decorators with Zend_Form on Zend DEVZONE.