Re: Building "Advanced Search" like forms using QuickForm

On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 09:06:33 -0500, Ravindra Wankar <rwankar@celoxis.com> wrote: > > I've looked at HTML_Quickform and FormBuilder and have a few questions > regarding its use for non-add/edit forms. > If you're not adding/editing, why are you using FB? If you're talking a general search functionality for any table this could be done with FB (I've done it), but I don't really see how using FB for non-DB operations would work. > I have seen the example using the QuickHtml renderer. Seems like too > much work for custom forms. > > e.g "Advanced Search" form or many times one has "filter" forms > associated with huge > amounts of tabular data. Also, if one needs to display an add/edit form > in a 2-col > layout (for better space utilization) again I must write my own template. Well, not necessarily. I've been using 'html' elements and the equivalent of insertElementBefor() in HTML_QuickForm for a project I'm working on to break up a form into multiple columns. It's not too hard. > > Basically, you first call addElement() to tell quickform about the > elements and then use them in a 'template'. The moment I write my own > template, I have to handle the display of form errors next to elements > and that becomes a pain for each form. Having to write code in 2 places > (one where you call addElement() and then the template) also does not > seem very elegant. I can understand this. Buth with FB, you don't have to addElement manually.... > > Any suggestions on doing this? > > Has anyone considered the following possibility of doing something like > what you can do with apache struts (for Java)? Special tags are defined > for form elements eg > > |<P>Username: <html:text property="username"/></P> > > When rendering this, the error is automatically shown next to the element. If you want fancy > formatting, you can get hold of the errors and display them yourself. > > This way I don't have to construct form elements using addElement() separately > and form developers need not worry about displaying error messages. > The validation rules can be specified at the top template. > > One way might be to write an xsl transformer that converts files written like these > into a format that can then be run thru the QuickHTML renderer. This will add to > a performance problem as each form has to be parsed twice (once by the pre-processor > and then by QuickForm). It might be possible to pre-process the templates first but then > this introduces a "build" step that spoils the fun of being able to simple save files > and refresh my browser to see the changes (not to mention slowing development). > > See http://formsess.sourceforge.net for something similar. It > is based on smarty. As QuickForm is so popular > I'd prefer direct support under QuickForm. > > Can QuickForm developers add direct support for something like this? Any better ideas? > This has been talked about before. I would suggest changing the ArraySmarty renderer to give you the whole error/element html segment as one string and writing your smarty template with just that one string for output of each element. -- paperCrane --Justin Patrin--