Zend Framework and hidden fields

Great quality post! Thanks!

Yes, this hard to remove extra markup in the wrong places and inability to place good markup where you want when you want is making me batty.

The rest works fine but the decorators seem kludgy to me.

And I’d love if the docs that showed examples made sure to include the config file w/ each one. By sticking this stuff in a config file, you can reuse validators/filters in your javascript.

Zend escapes the label, so it outputs “ ” in the actual HTML. Rather than toying with the escape function, I just used the following workaround:

$element->setLabel( ‘-’ );
$decorators['Zend_Form_Decorator_Label']
->setOption( ‘disable’, ‘disable’ )
;

(Assuming that $decorators is the result of $element->getDecorators()).

This is much easier to really hide the hidden field: Simply delete the Decorators of the element:

$hiddenElement->setDecorators(array());

Fixing this problem with a View Helper is a waste of time imho.

I created a mother class (that extends Zend_From) for all my forms, and rewritten render() function:

public function render(Zend_View_Interface $view = null)
{
	foreach ($this->getElements() as $element) {
		if ($element instanceof Zend_Form_Element_Hidden) {
			$element->setDecorators(array('ViewHelper'));
		}
	}
 
	return parent::render($view);
}

So no different code is written in forms or views.
You can use even Tudor solution with my implementation.

P.S.: Tudor, make possible and easily visibile for all how to comment code plz.

Forms are not properly in one letter of the MVC acronym, forms are forms, in fact in a form you manage the Model/Control of a form (validators, ‘required’ etc) and also the View (decorators, label, etc), so i think that is right and legitimate to manipulate all form properties directly in form classes.

Moreover, that implementation skimp lines of code and new classes creation with the same results and no different business logic nor logic error.

Btw, this is my interpretation.

@Tudor Your last solution will still generate dt’s without a class. At best it will add a class to the inside the .

Could you confirm this, or did you prepare your elements in a special way (changing the decorators etc).

You should use ViewHelper and HtmlTag decorators in order to achieve this. The following piece of code will completely ignore the label tag (incl. the dl) and it will generate both the dd and input tags.

class Zend_View_Helper_StripHidden {
    public function stripHidden( Zend_Form $_form ) {
        foreach( $_form->getElements() as $element ) {
            if( $element instanceof Zend_Form_Element_Hidden ) {
				$element->setDecorators(array(
				    'ViewHelper',
				    array('HtmlTag', array('tag' => 'dd', 'class' =>'hidden')),
				));
            }
        }
 
        return $_form;
    }
}

I use …

->removeDecorator(‘label’)
->removeDecorator(‘HtmlTag’);

… stacked and it works, for hidden and hash elements.

I don’t care if it does not validate.