Question

I have a database with a simple one-to-many relationship that looks like this:

Tables   Company        Category
Rows     ID             ID
         Name           Name
         Category_ID

I have a forms where I can add, edit and delete the company’s or category’s name, which works fine. Entering the category by ID also works, but is obviously terrible to use. What I want is a simple select element in the form to pick from an existing category.

The code I have to generate the <select> is:

$this->add(array(
        'name' => 'Categorie',
        'type'  => 'Zend\Form\Element\Select',
        'attributes' => array(
            'options'  => $categories,
        ),
        'options' => array(
            'label' => 'Categorie',
        ),
));

From what I could find in the (extremely sparse) ZF2 documentation, I should be using a Hydrator to fetch data into the $categories variable, but I’m not sure where to go from there.

Any sort of example or tips would be well appreciated!

Answer 1

Here‘s a very good article about forms.

My solution is based on this tutorial and it is (almost) working well. I don’t know if you use Doctrine for your project or not, but I think it would be a very good idea!

I also heavily use select elements. In the given fieldset, I generate value options for a select with this piece of code:

$opt= Registry::get('entityManager')->getRepository('My\Entity\Categories')
                ->getCategoriesForCombobox();
$this->get('category')->setValueOptions($opt);

If you (plan to) use Doctrine, you should read about repositories very carefully in the Doctrine documentation. If you use collections in the form, the topic about associations is also a must read.