Rob Allen writes; A while ago I needed to ask a user for their date of birth on a Zend_Form. The design showed three separate select elements to do this:
Screen shot of a 3 select boxes for a date on a form
A little bit of googling found this site http://codecaine.co.za/posts/compound-elements-with-zend-form which has not unfortunately disappeared, so the code in this article owes a lot of the author of that article.
It turns out to be remarkably simple to create a single Zend Form element that is rendered as multiple form elements. We create an element object and a view helper object and we’re done. Usage then looks like:
< ?php
class Application_Form_Details extends Zend_Form
{
public function init()
{
$this->addPrefixPath('App_Form', 'App/Form/');
// other elements before
$this->addElement('date', 'date_of_birth', array(
'label' => 'Date of birth:'
));
// other elements after
$this->addElement('submit', 'Go');
}
}
Obviously, this form lives in application/forms/Detail.php and is rendered as usual in a view script. In our form definition, we have added an element called ‘date’ and with the addition of the addPrefixPath call have told the form that in addition to using the standard Zend Framework form elements, also look in library/App/Form. (Incidentally, we can also now override any supplied form element by simply dropping a replacement into the libraryApp/Form folder.)
The date form element lives in library/App/Form/Element/Date.php as Zend_Form knows to look in a subfolder for App/Form called Elements for any element objects and will look in the Decorator/ sub folder for decorator objects.
The Date element looks like this:
Read the rest at Rob Allen’s DevNotes.