Question

I want to replicate the html that the cakephp form helper creates, so i can add to it and integrate it into my bootstrap front end. Basically the cakephp form helper isnt generating the html I need.

Someone else built the app using cake forms, and I dont want to rewrite the backend.

I thought it would simply be a case of including the correct input names, form classes etc, and building upon it. It seems however that even an exact copy/paste of the form html doesnt trigger the cakephp form errors.

It sends identical headers to cake,
http://pastebin.com/JZyCk6cv
so I can only assume that the cakephp form helper does some jiggery pokery when its constructed in the template, in order to trigger validation errors?

Answer 1

I think the best solution is to create a custom CakePHP-Helper. If you’re using twitter-bootstrap i recommend this Helper, packed as a plugin:

https://github.com/loadsys/twitter-bootstrap-helper

Form validation should work, as it uses CakePHP’s core form-helper to create inputs and labels.

Maybe you don’t have to rewrite or edit much if you use search and replace (replace $this->Form->input by $this->TwitterBootstrap->input).