Question

I have a Symfony 1.4 application to allow users to enter data to a electrical appliance testing database. The page in questions consists of multiple embedded “new” forms so the user can submit many tests in one go. The form validates and saves correctly, but feedback is that it will be tedious to use.

As much of the data may be the same in each test (e.g. same date, same result, same person doing the testing), I would like the user to be able to fill in values in the top row, then click a button to fill the same information in the rows below. I’m pretty sure this would require javascript, but I don’t have much experience.

I would appreciate any suggestions.

Many Thanks.

Answer 1

Well, I managed to figure it out without using javascript.

I put a button on the page

<input type="submit" name="copy_values" value="duplicate">

In the action for the page I included the code…

 elseif (isset($_POST['copy_values'])) {
   // get values from first embedded test
   $newTests = $testList['new_tests'];
   $testDate = $newTests[0]['et_date_tested'];
   $testedBy = $newTests[0]['et_tester_id'];
   $formOptions = array('test_date'=>$testDate, 'tester'=>$testedBy);
   $this->form = new MultiTestForm(null, $formOptions);
 }
 $this->setTemplate('multiAdd');

… which takes the values from the widgets in the top row of the form and creates an array. This is passed as the options array to create a new form.

In the top level form class..

public function configure()
{
  ...
  $subform = new sfForm();
  for($i = 0;$i < sfConfig::get('app_new_test_rows'); $i ++) 
  {
    $formToAdd = new TestsForMultiAddForm(null,$this->getOptions());
    $subform->embedForm($i, $formToAdd);
  }

  $this->embedForm('new_tests', $subform);
}

…and in the embedded form class…

 public function configure() 
{
   ...
   if ($this->getOption('test_date'))  {
     $this->setDefault('et_date_tested', $this->getOption('test_date'));
   }
   if ($this->getOption('tester')) {
     $this->setDefault('et_tester_id', $this->getOption('tester'));
   }
    ...
 }

Not sure if this is the conventional way to approach the problem, but it works!