Question

Is there any way to do that with a decorator or do I need to dig deeper into ZF?

Answer 1

If you have multiple validators attached to one form element and want only the first error message to pop up, you can set breakChainOnFailure option to TRUE for each validator. In this case, if one of the validators fails, all the subsequent validators are skipped.

$element->addValidator(
             new Zend_Validate_StringLength(array('min' => 6, 'max' => 12)),
             true)
        ->addValidator(new Zend_Validate_Alnum());