Symfony 1.2 offers several levels of control over templates for forms.
In practice, though, only two are useful:
1. echo $form
Handy for quick and dirty testing and for situations where a pure and
simple columnar layout enhanced a bit by CSS is acceptable. But all of
the rows have to be styled in exactly the same way because there is no
individual CSS access to them.
2. echo $form['fieldname']->renderLabel(),
$form['fieldname']->render(), $form['fieldname']->renderErrors()
Allows complete control over the HTML surrounding the row. But you
pretty much have to do it for the entire form, or else do something
ungainly like:
while (($key, $dummyl) = each($form))
{
if ($key == 'foo')
{
special handling;
}
else
{
$key->renderRow();
}
}
But what about $form->render(), which can accept a hash of widget
names and HTML attributes for them? What about $form->renderRow(),
which can also do that?
The problem is that both of these methods only accept attributes for
the widget control itself (the 'input' element, for instance). And
this is not especially useful, because what we typically want to do is
influence the layout of controls relative to one another. But we don't
have any influence over the <tr> or <li> elements the input elements
are embedded in. So we're stuck going all the way to the lowest level.
I believe ->render() and ->renderRow() would be much more useful if
they accepted attributes intended for the formatting element that
contains the row, not just the attribute itself.
Then you could write:
$form->render(array('editors' => array('rowAttributes' =>
array('class' => 'floating-column'))));
... To set a class on the <li> that encloses that particular row,
allowing meaningful influence over the layout.
Similar provisions for labelAttributes and errorsAttributes would also
be helpful.
(It would be nice if grandparent selectors worked in CSS, but they
don't - you really can't look "up the tree" and change the layout of
the element that your input element is contained in. So classes on the
input element are not very useful in laying out a form.)
--
Tom Boutell
www.punkave.com
www.boutell.com
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