Hi, tl;dr: I want to make some changes to the ZF AnnotationBuilder and Form sources and would appreciate some feedback.
I've been greatly intrigued with the AnnotationBuilder feature to allow me to configure the editing form of an entity in the very same entity. In particular with the DoctrineModule and -Hydrator it's now possible to configure everything about an entity in one place, e.g. if the db column is Varchar(32) immediately configure the input validators to now allow more than 32 characters, etc. Unfortunately I've also encountered some limitations which I found to be mostly due to the fact that the AB is a comparatively new feature. I'd like to address some of these limitations and also provide the solutions (Pull Requests) if accepted. The biggest problem I encountered is that forms can't have subforms. Technically there is no problem as forms are also fieldsets and can be added just like these, but the devil is in the details. So why is this needed for the AnnotationBuilder? Here's a use case: https://github.com/CrisMKM/zf2FormTesting Say you have a user entity with the annotations configured to create a form to edit it. But depending on context you want to edit it differently: On Registration you want to edit different things as when a registered user wants to edit his profile and again another edit view for an administrator managing users. In each of these cases you want to bind a user object to the form and after validation get a newly configured user to store in database or wherever. 1. For Registration you'd only ask for the username, email and password as well as a password repeat and attach custom validators to prevent duplicate usernames and emails. 2. A user editing his account details you'd deny editing the username and would require the current password to change any details. 3. The administrator would be able to edit the user just like he wants, except for some fields like registration date, last login, etc. For each of these cases I'd create a new action form class, make the AnnotationBuilder create the User entity form, place it on my action form and have it take appropriate measures to resemble the cases above, like adding or eliminating elements, filters and validators. I've already extended the AnnotationBuilder class locally to take care of some of these changes and it works great. But my biggest problem is that forms aren't really designed to have other forms in the fieldset arrays, in particular when it comes to validation, namely: Form::attachInputFilterDefaults() doesn't attach InputFilters of subforms and Form::bindValues() doesn't return the object as does Fieldset::bindValues() and also causes the form values to be set to the bound object multiple times. I do have some more issues and suggestions but don't want to make this too long. Please let me know if there's some fundamental flaw in my idea or what could be done better/differently. I'll gladly provide the codes to the zf github repos. Best regards, Cristian -- List: fw-general@lists.zend.com Info: http://framework.zend.com/archives Unsubscribe: fw-general-unsubscr...@lists.zend.com
