Question

To complete a Yii form field, users often need to search for a referenced model record (like searching for a friend’s profile in a social app). I’m sure other Yii apps are doing this elegantly. But in my dirty approach, in the search results page, I use a CHtml::submitButton to POST two models back to the form containing:

1. the “found” record (a user id associated with one of the profiles from the search results)
2. the previously entered form field contents (relationship characterization fields)

Alternatively, the autocomplete widget works well, but doesn’t do the detailed search that I need (e.g. search based on a partial name and city or state or other user profile content).

Alternatively, you’d think that within the search results view I might be able to modify the form member to contain the found record (new friend’s user id) and just POST/submit the modified model from the search results page . But for that to work each of the search results in the list needs a unique user id populated in that form field, and I can’t figure out how to duplicate the form model before modifying that one member server-side for each of the search results’ “submit” or “select” buttons, and it just doesn’t seem right to create all those form models.
So what seems to work is to submit two separate models using subforms (within the search results view) , with the submitButton POSTing a model and the extra parameter (user id) separately.

Is there a better way? …to link to and from a search results page and a form field, retaining already-entered data and populating the searched for field with a selected record from the search results.

Here’s controllers/SiteController:

public function actionBefriend() {
    $model=new BefriendForm;
    if(isset($_POST['BefriendForm'])) {
        $model->attributes=$_POST['BefriendForm'];
        if ($model->validate()) {
            $model->createFriendship();
            $this->redirect('Index'); } 
        else
            $er=$model->getErrors(); }
    if(isset($_POST['idfriend'])) {
        $model->idfriend=$_POST['idfriend']; }
    if(isset($model->idfriend)) {
        $model->friend_name=Bio::model()->findByPk($model->idfriend)->name; }
    $this->render('newFrienship', array('model' =>$model)); // newFriendship is the form view }

Here’s controllers/Bio.php (Profile)

public function actionIndex() {
    $criteria = new CDbCriteria();
    $model=new BefriendForm;
    if(isset($_GET['q']))
        $q = $_GET['q'];
    elseif (isset($_POST['BefriendForm']))  {
        $model->attributes=$_POST['BefriendForm'];
        $q = $model['friend_name']; }
    if(isset($q))   {
        $criteria->compare('name', $q, true, 'OR');
        $criteria->compare('city', $q, true, 'OR');
        $criteria->compare('state', $q, true, 'OR');
        $criteria->compare('bio_text', $q, true, 'OR'); }
    else
        $q = '';
    $dataProvider=new CActiveDataProvider('Bio', array('criteria'=>$criteria));
    $this->render('index',array('dataProvider'=>$dataProvider, 'q'=>$q, 'model'=>$model )); }

Here’s the start of views/site/newFriendship (form view)

<?php $form=$this->beginWidget('CActiveForm', array(
    'id'=>'newFriendship-BefriendForm',
    'enableAjaxValidation'=>true,)); ?>

Here’s the core of views/bio/index.php (search results index page):

<?php $this->widget('zii.widgets.CListView', array(
'dataProvider'=>$dataProvider,
'itemView'=>'_view',
'viewData'=>array('model'=>$model) )); ?>

Here’s the search result row in views/bio/_view.php that links back to BefriendForm (SiteController) that sends the id of the user to populate the friend field in the form (which gets a name from the id):

<form method="POST">
    <input type="hidden" name="idfriend" value="<?php echo $data->idfriend ?>" />
    // Here's that submit button that I can't get to send both the model 
    //and the idfriend back to the form to repopulate it
    //   without manually writing HTML to submit all the fields individually
    //   or creating 2 subforms to submit together with a signle submitButton.
    <?php echo CHtml::submitButton('Befriend', array('submit' => array('site/Befriend'),'model'=$model);
</form>

Answer 1

Turns out you can just replace the form field containing the primary key with the appropriate value before POSTing back to the NewFriendship form when the user clicks the “Select” or “Befriend” button. So only one model is posted back to the original form from the search results page.

Replace the section from views/bio/_view.php in the question with…

<?php
foreach($model->attributeNames() as $name)
  if($name != 'friend_id')
    echo CHtml::activeHiddenField($model,$name);
  else
    echo CHtml::activeHiddenField($model,$name,array('value'=>$data->getPrimaryKey()));
echo CHtml::submitButton('Befriend', array('submit' => array('site/Befriend')));
?>