Using ViewScript Decorator on Nested Subforms (Zend Form)

Are you just trying to output your form using <?php echo $this->form; ?> from your view script?

That works well for simple forms, but for my more complex forms I tend to render each element individually but don’t need to use ViewScript decorator on each individual element to do this. Just try something like this from your view script:

<div class="form">
    <fieldset>
        <legend>Some Form Name</legend>
        <form action="<?php echo $this->escape($this->form->getAction()) ?>"
              method="<?php echo $this->escape($this->form->getMethod()) ?>"
              enctype="multipart/form-data">

            <?php echo $this->form->id; // render the id element here ?>

            <div class="half">
                <?php echo $this->form->name; // render the user name field here ?>
            </div>
            <div class="half">
                <?php echo $this->form->description; // render the description element here ?>
            </div>
            <div class="clear"></div>

            <div class="half">
                <?php echo $this->form->address1; // render the address ?>
            </div>
            <div class="half">
                <?php echo $this->form->address2; // render address2 ?>
            </div>
            <div class="clear"></div>

            <div class="third">
                <?php echo $this->form->zip; // render zip code ?>
            </div>
            <div class="third">
                <?php echo $this->form->city; // render city ?>
            </div>
            <div class="third">
                <?php echo $this->form->state; // render state ?>
            </div>
            <div class="clear"></div>

            <div class="half">
                <?php echo $this->form->country; // render country ?>
            </div>
            <div class="clear"></div>

            <?php echo $this->form->submit; ?>

        </form>
    </fieldset>
</div>

That is how I do most of my forms because I want to have some elements take up half the width and others the full width.

Surprisingly, the reference guide doesn’t tell you that you can do this. I seem to remember a page about it in the past but cannot find it now. When I got started with Zend Framework, I thought the only way I could get my form to output exactly how I wanted was to create complex decorators, but that is not the case.

Matthew Weier O’Phinney has a great blog post on rendering Zend_Form decorators individually which explains what I did above. I hope they add this to the first page of Zend Form because that was discouraging to me at first. The fact is, 90% of my forms render elements individually instead of just echo’ing the form itself.

Note: To stop ZF from enclosing my form elements in the dt and dd tags, I apply this decorator to all of my standard form elements. I have a base form class that I extend all of my forms from so I don’t have to repeat this everywhere. This is the decorator for the element so I can use tags to enclose my elements.

public $elementDecorators = array(
    'ViewHelper',
    'Errors',
    array('Description', array('tag' => 'p',    'class' => 'description')),
    array('HtmlTag',     array('tag' => 'div', 'class' => 'form-div')),
    array('Label',       array('class' => 'form-label', 'requiredSuffix' => '*'))
);

For my submit buttons I use

public $buttonDecorators = array(
    'ViewHelper',
    array('HtmlTag', array('tag' => 'div', 'class' => 'form-button'))
);