a wheel.. err a Form

[ednark]

ok im at the point in my project where i need to remember the state of a form. though i know this wheel has been invented before, but ihavent been able to find anything i want.

I'm not really asking for a solution per-se but just wanted to see some people opinion on this, and of course im open to criticism/comment

i guess ill just think of this as a blog for this project, which i should be done with by tomorrow

i want to...
  .  have a Form Object

  .  store the currect state of the form

  .  store the a default state in the form

  .  be able to ask the form to store its values for later

  .  be able to ask the form to retieve its values from before

  .  have the form be aware of which values are mandatory

  .  have the form validate its contents

  .  have the form find its contents automaticlaly from some location like GET/POST/REQUEST

  .  have the form be able to produce a correct html input for each field

that doesn't seem to ask much does it 🙂

i have a lot of random code that does most of this, so i've already done most of the work, im just kinda collefting and organizing my thought into one object

[sarahk]

Buy a product called Selectica

We did stuff like this using a knowledge base, java and javascript. As we wrote each control to the form we appended a javascript array when the control was required. Then when the user clicked submit we'd run through the array and not allow the submit if fields didn't qualify. We even made the array multidimensional so that we could check the type of the data - ie valid phone numbers, numbers and dates. Pretty cool. Sessions were vital.

However you want to do it all from an object. Wow. Big job.

good luck

[ednark]

wouldn't be any fun if i used someone elses, and its not that big, just time consuming

first draft in zip format attached:

here is a watered down version with nothing but function calls. so you can see wht im after

<?php
class Form
{
    var $form_uid;
    var $form_name;
    var $data;
    var $data_default;
    var $field_definitions;

function Form()
{
    $this->form_uid  = NULL;
    $this->form_name = NULL;
    $this->data         = array();
    $this->data_default = array();
    $this->field_definitions = array();
}

function loadDefinition( $from_file )

function findData( $order=NULL )

function setToDefault()

function forgetState( $id=NULL )

function rememberState( $id=NULL )

function retrieveState( $id=NULL )

function inputFactory($field, $input_name=NULL )
{
    if ( empty($input_name) ) {
        $input_name = "{$this->form_name}[{$field}]";
    }
    $value = isset($this->data[$field]) ? $this->data[$field] : '';
    $type = $this->field_definitions[$field]['type'];
    $attributes = $this->field_definitions[$field]['attributes'];
    switch ( $type ) {
        case 'checkbox':
        case 'text':
        case 'hidden':
        case 'textarea':
        case 'password':
        case 'select':
        case 'radio_group':
        case 'radio':
    }
}

function basicForm()
{
    print <<<END_FORM
    <form action="{$PHP_SELF}" method="get" />
    <table><caption>{$this->form_name}</caption>

END_FORM;
        foreach ( array_keys($this->field_definitions) as $field ) {
            $input = $this->inputFactory($field);
            print <<<END_FORM
            <tr>
              <td>{$field}</td>
              <td>{$input}</td>
            </tr>

END_FORM;
        }
        print <<<END_FORM
        <tr><td colspan="2"><input type="submit" /></td></tr>
        </table>
        </form>

END_FORM;
    }
}

$form = new Form();
$form->form_name = 'form1';
$form->loadDefinition( 'form_test.form_defs.php' );
$form->retrieveState();
if ( !$form->findData('PG') ) {
    $form->retrieveState();
}
$form->rememberState();
#$form->forgetState();
echo $form->basicForm();
?>