Question

I used this tutorial (especially Lesson 6 and 7) to create my own backend grid for Magento: http://www.pierrefay.com/magento-developper-guide-howto-tutorial-5

Everything works fine. I can create new data entries for my grid. If I click on an entry the VarienForm is displayed again but all the text fields are empty. This seems as if Magento thinks I want to edit all the text fields. But actually I want it to display the entry data first. But it only shows empty fields.

Can anyone help me out here? Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

There are a lot of things that could be wrong with your implementation, but it’s impossible to say without seeing your code. Nevertheless, I’m going to try. That tutorial looks fine to me, but I haven’t run the code so I can’t be sure. I’m inclined to think you might have just missed something. Working in grids & tabs can be particularly delicate at the best of times.

It does sound to me like it’s one of two things. It sounds like either

A) Your model data is not being stored in the registry. That means the problem is in this part of the code:

<?php
class Pfay_Test_Adminhtml_IndexController extends Mage_Adminhtml_Controller_Action
{
    ...
    public function editAction()
    {
        $testId = $this->getRequest()->getParam('id');
        $testModel = Mage::getModel('test/test')->load($testId);
        if ($testModel->getId() || $testId == 0)
        {
            Mage::register('test_data', $testModel);
        }

What this section of code does is ‘registers’ the selected model in Magento’s registry. Later in the code, you’ll see that it calls:

$form->setValues(Mage::registry('test_data')->getData());

to populate your form fields.

Try putting commands like these in the code above:

var_dump($testId);
die();

or

print_r($testModel);
die();

and running it again. Is $testId being set? Is $testModel being loaded? Is the if statement for the registry loading? If not, trace the problem back.

or it might also be

B) Your form is not prepopulating data because the column names are wrong.

Look where the code says:

<?php
class Pfay_Test_Block_Adminhtml_Test_Edit_Tab_Form extends Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Widget_Form
{
   protected function _prepareForm()
   {
       $form = new Varien_Data_Form();
       $this->setForm($form);
       $fieldset = $form->addFieldset('test_form', array('legend'=>'ref information'));
       $fieldset->addField('nom', 'text',
           array(
               'label' => 'Nom',
               'class' => 'required-entry',
               'required' => true,
               'name' => 'nom',
           )
       );

You need to ensure that “nom” is in fact one of your model’s attribute names. Did you change the attribute names when you created your test model and forgot to change it here? Change these values accordingly.

I hope that this helps you to solve your problem. Good luck!