Question

I need to obtain something like this in zend

<input type="text" name="phone[1]" value="" />
<input type="text" name="address[1]" value="" />
<input type="text" name="banana[1]" value="whatever" />

Notice they have the same id inside the brackets! (i don’t need name="phone[]" , or name="phone[phone1]")

I’ve tried and
https://stackoverflow.com/a/3673034/579646 and
https://stackoverflow.com/a/406268/579646 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/7061713/579646

The problem is in ZendFramework i end up having to name 3 elements with the same name “1” and the last overwrites the previous. Even if i create 3 subforms i get the same effect.

Different examples show how to obtain an array with different indexes or no index([]), but i need different array to have the same index.

Thanks

Answer 1

Zend_Form has a feature for this named setElementsBelongTo. See
http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.form.advanced.html

The way of use this is setting to the Zend_Form object the prefix with setElementsBelongTo, if you want iterate over each field then you can use subforms to encapsulate each group of fields

You can call to setElementsBelongTo in your controller or in the init() method of your form class:

$mainForm = new Zend_Form();

$phoneForm = new Zend_Form_Subform();
$element = $phoneForm->createElement('text', '1'); // 1 is the element inside of the brackets
$phoneForm->addElement($element);
$phoneForm->setElementsBelongTo('phone'); // phone is the part leading the brackets
$mainForm->addSubform($phoneForm, 'phone_form');

$phoneForm = new Zend_Form_Subform();
$element = $phoneForm->createElement('text', '2'); // 1 is the element inside of the brackets
$phoneForm->addElement($element);
$phoneForm->setElementsBelongTo('phone'); // phone is the part leading the brackets
$mainForm->addSubform($phoneForm, 'phone_form2');

$addressForm = new Zend_Form_Subform();
$element = $addressForm->createElement('text', '1');
$addressForm->addElement($element);
$addressForm->setElementsBelongTo('address');
$mainForm->addSubform($addressForm, 'address_form');

echo $mainForm;

var_dump($mainForm->getValues());

gives

 array(2) { 
["phone"]=> array(2) { [1]=> NULL [2]=> NULL } 
["address"]=> array(1) { [1]=> NULL } } 

To get your expected result you will need remove some decorators (Form, dt, etc):

<input type="text" name="phone[1]" value="" />
<input type="text" name="address[2]" value="" />

Then when you retrieve the values with $form->getValues() the result is:

Array(
   'phone' = Array(
       '1' => <value>,
   ),
   'address' = Array(
       '1' => <value>,
   )
);