Hi,
I'm trying to achieve what I thought was a simple task, but turns out to
be rather complex... I just want to double check that it's not a totally
stupid approach.
So I have a form, and I want to ensure that required elements are
rendered with a nice background colour to indicate this to the user.
Now it seems that the Label decorator will helpfully put a class into
the containing dt element (by default it's a dt... I know you can change
this). That's great, but it's not the containing element for the actual
field itself, so it's not overly useful for the stylistic result I want
to achieve.
So the approach I've taken is to create my own decorator, call
"RequiredClass", all it does is add either a "required" or "optional"
class to the element. In order for this to work, it has to be processed
before ViewHelper decorator.
As the forms may be reused in a different context, I do not want to
apply the decorators at a base class level. I therefore created an
action helper called DecorateForm. This means I can do something like:
function fooAction()
{
$this->view->form = $this->_helper->decorateForm(new My_Form());
}
In order to ensure that each element in the form has the RequiredClass
decorator I do the following in my DecorateForm action helper:
foreach ($form->getElements() as $el)
{
$decorators = $el->getDecorators();
array_unshift($decorators, new My_Form_Decorator_RequiredClass());
$el->setDecorators($decorators);
}
While this is all abstracted etc. and doesn't really get in the way, it
seems like a bit of a long road for a shortcut! Is there a better way to
achieve this end result?
e.g. Would it be better to instead change the HtmlTag decorator to add
the class to the containing element? In the default case, this would
make the dt and the dd consistent in terms of the class attached to them.
If this is desirable and acceptable, I'd happily make that change and
submit the patch.
Cheers for any insights.
Col
--
Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/
Day Job:
Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
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