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HtForm

Installation

To install this package use composer:

Overview

Forget about everything you've seen so far regarding form building tools and libraries. The approach you are going to see here is something totally new and straightforward:

• No need to instantiate and/or configure tons of objects.
• No need to define and connect the form to a model.
• No need to have xml or yml files defining how the form is supposed to behave.
• No need to define your own form and field classes.
• No need to setup a "renderer engine" before the form can be rendered.
• No need to get the form builder from a DIC (Dependency Injection Container)

Usage

All you have to do is this: create a form object, add some fields and echo it:

Outputs:

That is pretty easy, huh?

Adding labels to fields

By default fields don't have a label but you can add one by calling the label setter on a field instance:

Outputs:

Making field labels inline

By default a field's label is a block level element. You can change that by passing the inline => true flag:

Outputs:

Defining Placeholders

You can use the placeholder setter which is really just a shortcut for setting the field's 'placeholder' attribute:

Outputs:

Other attributes can be set by passing an associative array to the field's attrs method.

Adding different types of fields

A form is all about attaching a bunch of fields for taking user input. Different field types are available in this library:

Outputs:

Each field type is defined in its own class. These classes have a repostory of their own too. For more info on the fields API, take a look in the following repositories:

• HtField - Abstract base class for all fields

  • HtButton - Non-widget field
  • HtHidden - Non-widget field
• HtWidget - Base class for all widget types (extends HtField)
  • HtTextin - Widget for single-line text input
  • HtTextar - Widget for multi-line text input
  • HtCheckb - Widget for boolean input (checkbox)
  • HtSelect - Widget for choosing an option from a list
  • HtUpload - Widget for uploading a file

Notice: when adding the "upload" field the form will automatically have enctype=multipart/form-data and method=POST

Make all fields inline at once

Sometimes you need to build "quick search" type of forms in which all fields are rendered in a single line. For this you can use the inline method on the form instance:

Outputs:

Make all fields readonly at once

Sometimes you want to reuse the same form layout/structure but in readonly mode. In this case you can call the readonly method of the form object in order to disable editing on all fields:

Outputs:

Changing Form Attributes

By default, the form is rendered with the following attributes:

• method: GET
• action: ?
• id: random id

But these can be changed easily by calling the corresponding setters on the form instance:

Outputs:

Populate form with data

In order to populate the form with data you have to call the context method on the form object and pass an associative array to it. The keys of the associative array must match the names of the fields you added to the form:

Outputs:

Processing form submission

Processing a form is all about populating it with incoming data and calling the process method. It is also good practice to check if a flag is present indicating that the form has been sent. Check this out:

Outputs:

Validate form submission

You can add validation rules to be checked upon form submission. Validation rules are added on a per-field basis and yield error messages when something is wrong. These errors are available in the result object returned by the process method. Take a look:

Outputs:

Namespacing form fields

The data structure behind your form doesn't have to be flat. You can group fields into logical sections, see example below:

Outputs:

Unfold form data

As you may have seen in the last example, even though we can process complex data structures sent over a request, the data is extracted in a flat format. Luckily, the result object provides a method called unfold which can be used to reconstruct the data into a multidimensional array:

Outputs: