Remove Element from within a view in Zend 2 Forms - php

Question

When removing an element from a form I would usually use
$this->form->remove('foo');
How would I remove an element from a fieldset? for example my $blocks is a fieldset with multiple elements but this doesn't work to remove unwanted elements
$blocks = $this->form->get('page')->get('blocks');
$blocks->remove('active');

Answer 1

When you remove the Form\Element from within a view it will still be present after the creation of the Form that will be passed to the Controller. I strongly suggest for you to be doing a proper OOP approach to your problem. Mainly there's two solutions for this.
The base is always identical, have a Form\Fieldset that matches your Model / Entity. It can have as many child-fieldsets as you need.
Option 1 - Create different Forms and remove elements
Basically this approach would look something like this:
'EntitySubEditForm' => function ($fem) {
$form = new DefaultForm();
$form->get('fieldset')->remove('foo');
$form->get('fieldset')->remove('bar');
return $form;
}
This will basically function like the approach you went, only at the respective place.
The upside to this approach is that you can render your form using $this->formCollection().
The downside to this approach is that even though you may use caching it simply requires more cache-data (hdd-space). And even though it's cheap by now, no reason to waste it ;)
Option 2 - Just don't validate certain fields
You may choose just to ignore some data passed in your special form.
'EntitySubEditForm' => function($fem) {
$form = new DefaultForm();
$form->setValidationGroup(array(
'id', 'name', 'title',
'etc....'
)); // but NOT 'foo' or 'bar'
return $form;
}
This is the approach I'm going. The reason is that I am caching the created Form-Objects so that Form creation is faster. Setting up a validationGroup then allows me to simply ignore values that are sent having these keys. Remember: unvalidated data is NOT passed from Zend\Form.
The downside to this approach is, that you can't render your form using $this->formCollection(), because the elements are still there and would be rendered. You'd have to manually render respective rows using $this->formRow() or even more manually...
more to read...
You may further be interested in the /docs of DoctrineModule #github because it covers a good use-case and describes well how Zend\Form should be used when Forms for specific actions should have different fields. Iirc it uses Option 1.