Question

I’ve been using Symfony’s form framework for a while now. But would like to know if anyone has a better approach to embedding forms dynamically.

The problem arises when I embed a form (see bottom), I need to give it an array index, as Fabian explains how the sfForm object is like a multi-dimensional array in this article Advanced forms.

If I want to give the user the ability to click a button and embed another form, how can I achieve the following if they click the button multiple times:

<input type="parent[child][]" />
<input type="parent[child][]" />
<input type="parent[child][]" />

… repeated how many time user clicks a button. I can use fast javascript to copy and paste form elements in DOM.

Rather than this:

<input type="parent[child][1]" />
<input type="parent[child][2]" />
<input type="parent[child][3]" />

… repeated how many times user clicks a button. Requires javascript method to count how many times user clicks the button, ie to set correct array index. Also requires Ajax to call a PHP function that embeds form with this array index. I would like to avoid using this method if possible.

How I embed a form:

$parentForm = new ParentForm($parent)        

$child = new child();
$child->setParent($parent);

$sfForm = new sfForm();
$sfForm ->embedForm($someIndex, new ChildForm($child));

$parentForm->embedForm('child', $sfForm);

Answer 1

Hey, I found a way to do! The tricky part here is to override sfWidgetFormSchema::generateName method.

class myWidgetFormSchema extends sfWidgetFormSchema
{

  /**
   * Generates a name.
   *
   */
  public function generateName($name)
  {
    $name = parent::generateName($name);
    //match any [number] and replace it with []
    $name = preg_replace('/\[\d+\]/','[]', $name);
    return $name;
  }
}

Now, you only need to set this to your ‘wrapper’ form. Here’s my example with “Master has many Slaves” schema:

  public function configure()
  {
    $this->getWidgetSchema()->setFormFormatterName('list');
    $this->widgetSchema->setNameFormat('master[%s]');

    $slavesForm = new sfForm();
    $slavesForm->setWidgetSchema(new myWidgetFormSchema);
    $slavesCount = $this->getOption('slaves_count', 2);
    for ($i = 0; $i < $slavesCount; $i++)
    {
      $slave = new Slave();
      $slave->Master = $this->getObject();
      $form = new SlaveForm($slave);
      $slavesForm->embedForm($i, $form);
    }
    $this->embedForm('new_slaves', $slavesForm);
  }

Notice the ‘slaves_count’ option that I pass from executeCreate like this:

  public function executeCreate(sfWebRequest $request)
  {
    $schema = $this->getRequest()->getParameter('master');

    $this->form = new MasterNewForm(null, array('slaves_count'=> count($schema['new_slaves'])));

    $this->processForm($request, $this->form);

    $this->setTemplate('new');
  }

Now you can easily use jQuery to clone rows and not bother about index! Cheers.