Question

I’m a beginner with Zend. I have a little web site in which I can write articles for a community of users. For each article, the user is able to attach one or more file. I made a form to provide the ability to the admin to update an article.

I can display a list of input file for each file that were attached with the article.

Now I wish to diplay a link to the file on the right of my input file control.

I think I need to use decorator but I have a hard time finguring out how to make it work.

Any help on this please ?

Answer 1

Here is a simple way to use a View Helper in conjunction with the ViewHelper Decorator to append the link to your File element.

First, if you don’t already have a helper path set up, add this to application.ini:

resources.view.helperPath.My_View_Helper = "My/View/Helper/"

Then in your path (library folder works great), create the directory tree My/View/Helper.

Create the View Helper in the above directory, for the example I am calling it Link, so create My/View/Helper/Link.php

The contents of Link.php is:

<?php

class My_View_Helper_Link extends Zend_View_Helper_Abstract
{
    public function link($name, $value, $attribs, $elOptions)
    {
        if (!isset($attribs['linkOpts']) || !is_array($attribs['linkOpts']))
            return '';

        $linkOpts = $attribs['linkOpts'];

        $link = (isset($linkOpts['href'])) ? $linkOpts['href'] : '';
        $text = (isset($linkOpts['text'])) ? $linkOpts['text'] : '';

        if ($link == '' || $text == '') return '';

        return sprintf('<a href="%s">%s</a>', $link, htmlspecialchars($text));
    }
}

Now, when you create your element, all you need to do is add the ViewHelper decorator, and pass some link options.

$fileDecorators = array(
    'File',
    array('ViewHelper', array('helper' => 'link')), // Add ViewHelper decorator telling it to use our Link helper
    'Errors',
    array('Description', array('tag' => 'p', 'class' => 'description')),
    array('HtmlTag',     array('class' => 'form-div')),
    array('Label',       array('class' => 'form-label', 'requiredSuffix' => '*'))
);

$this->addElement('file', 'file1', array(
    'label'      => 'File Upload:',
    'required'   => false,
    'decorators' => $fileDecorators,
    'validators' => array(
        /* validators here */
     ),
    'linkOpts' => array('href' => 'http://site.com/page/link',
                        'text' => 'This is the link text',
    ),
));

Now if you use that stack of decorators for your file elements, and provide linkOpts to the element, it will render the link after the File input. If no linkOpts are provided, or the href or text element then no link will be output after the File element.

Hope that helps.