Question

In CakePHP is it possible to set the options you pass to the Form helper create method globally?

Since I want a specific form layout to be used on all my forms I am currently having to do this when I create every form.

<?php 
echo $this->Form->create('User', array(
    'class' => 'form-horizontal', 
    'inputDefaults' => array(
        'format' => array('before', 'label', 'between', 'input', 'error', 'after'), 
        'between' => '<div class="controls">', 
        'after' => '</div>', 
        'div' => 'control-group', 
        'error' => array(
            'attributes' => array('wrap' => 'span', 'class' => 'help-inline')
            )
        )
    ));
?> 

I was wondering if there was a way to specifiy this globally so I didn’t need do it with every create call.

Answer 1

The answer of starlocke is ok but I would not even want to write these three lines all over the place. 🙂 Neither I think this is really “config data”. So here is what I would do:

MyFormHelper extends FormHelper {
    public function create($model, $options) {
        $defaults = array(/* YOUR DEFAULT OPTIONS*/);
        $options = Set::merge($defaults, $options);
        //...
    }
}

Then simply call it:

$this->MyForm->create(‘Profile’);

or call it with a single option in the 2nd param you want to change somewhere.