I have a situation where I have several ways to perform the same activity in my php web app.
There is the "Manage Widgets" section of the app which has a form for creating new widgets and a list of existing widgets.
Then somewhere else in the app there is a button that pops up a dialog to add a new widget.
Then on the home page of the app there is another place where a form is embedded to add a widget (think home page portal).
My question is: What is the best practice for this? In this case all of the forms will be essentially the same. So my first instinct is to use the same code for all three of these scenarios. On the other hand, space on the home page could be smaller and layouts may have to differ between the three.
So even though it would be repetition, is it better to duplicate this form 3 times (there is a proper model layer, so the duplicated code would not include the logic to add/edit the widget)? Or try to force a single view in all of these scenarios? Both seem wrong to me and I am hoping for some ideas to discover some sort of middle ground.
One approach would be to have the markup (not the styles) for the form as a standalone file, which can then be included from anywhere you like.
You can then use AJAX to submit the form to a specific PHP script that handles the form submission and returns a meaningful JSON response. You can then display and style this JSON response on the page in question.
This way you have a single form (that can be styled differently) and a single handler for any view that's required to use the form.
i mean, the best way is compose form from other forms (Dont repeat yourself). You can use different templates for same form to change appearance of final form.
For example/idea you can check forms what is used in Nette Framework (http://doc.nette.org/en/forms)
T.
If you are just changing the styles, not the markup, I think the best approach is to add a specific class to the form element and then use Javascript (not Ajax, justa Javascript) to alternate between these clases as you need.
If your application do not use Ajax at all and you just generate web pages with PHP, is a simple matter of decide which class you form shoud have.
In CSS, you do something like this:
form.main { ... }
/* main form rules */
form.other { ... }
/* other form rules */
Related
it may seem like a dumb question because I feel like it is when asking it but I can't find anything about it in the doc.
I need to put a form in the header of my website that appears in all pages.
I need that form to be able to be submitted in every page (no surprise here).
I can display my form via the layout function of Zend Framework, but I can't find the equivalent for the back-end of the website to be able to treat it at only one place, site-wide.
I thought it would be possible to put the form validation in the bootstrap but it doesn't seem like it.
Did I miss something or do I have to, at least, put the form validation in all init() function of all my controllers ?
take a look at the plugin documentation
You can write a plugin that handles your request. If you need to have your form processed before any other actions take place, I suggest you use the dispatchLoopStartup() hook.
You should avoid predispatch and postdispatch in this case, because those hooks are called multiple times if you proces multiple actions (by using _forward for instance)
A very basic question. I have a form in one file form.php, I post it to another file processForm.php which does the server-side validation and processing. I am not using any framework.
Now, in case of form validation failure, I need to display the form again with all the values prefilled, without using a javascript history.back() from the processForm.php. What is the clean and proper way to do this so that I have all the posted values available again in form.php and can prefill them?
This is easy if the form submission happens to the same page, but this is how I got this and I cannot make the submission into the same page. So what would you do? Store the values in session? Curl post? Send the values using GET to form.php?
Why or why not? Please mention pros and cons.
Go read up on the MVC pattern.
You can't implement an interactive program without implementing a model, a view and a controller - the point is that your code should be structured to implement each of the three concerns as a single entity, be that as functions (or function trees), classes (or class trees) or files. And the three components within the pattern should be structurally grouped.
So if you want to the user to arrive at (say) second page after successfully filling in a form at first page, but to stay on first page when the form fails the validation, then a simple way to implement this would be to have first page implement the model view and controller, i.e. to both populate/generate the form and be the target for the form. Then if it receives a valid request sent from the form, send a redirect to second page.
This avoids the need for each page to load and process the MVC code for the preceding page as well as the current one - although that approach reduces the number of round trips to the browser which can help with performance.
NB using POST does not preclude the use of variables in the URL - indeed, I recommend using GET variables to indicate the data you wish to manipulate and POST variables to show how they should be manipulated.
I know this is not a drupal forum but, as I’m not getting any response there, I decided to give it a shot here.
I’m creating a web site that accepts custom content from users. So, for that matter, this site has a form and a custom module. Instead of using admin theme, this form is placed inside custom template which is created to have a uniform look with the rest of the pages. As a result, creating form elements through hook_form is out of question. Here’s where my problems lie. As this form uses custom theme, I’m not sure as to what can I do to make drupal know that user is submitting new content data when the form is submitted?
Would I need to use same query string that of content submission page of admin page like - ?q=node/add/page for action attribute of the html form?
(OR)
the only way is to map the url to my custom function and invoke some sort of hook inside of it?
Thanks
You can literally create any markup you want for your form, all you need to do is use the #theme attribute when you define the form. With it you can set theme functions for the form itself and any of the elements.
It is a very bad idea, not to use Drupal's FAPI. It solves so many problems for you, and not using it would be the first step to take if you want to open up a security hole in your site. A development framework like Drupal is not of much worth, if you don't use it's APIs.
Edit:
First thing to do, is to go to Drupal's FAPI reference. You can learn almost everything about the FAPI there.
You could use a template if you want, is just basic Drupal theming, but I would advise against it. It would be a lot more maintainable if you created theming functions for all the elements and used that instead, you could just loop through all the elements and render them like Drupal does, instead of having to edit a template file each you need to change the form. It might be a but more work now, but there's a reward to that work: cleaner and more maintainable code.
In code it looks something like this:
$form['item'] = array(
...
'#theme' => 'theme_function',
);
Doing this, the element will be rendered using the "theme_function". You can see an example of such a theme function for textfields.
I'm working on a web UI control called Folder - it basically mimics Windows Explorer folder - you see a grid of items inside a rectangle and can drag an item around, drop an item inside a different instance of the control, add new items and so on. each item is made of an item template - basically some php code that dictates the look of the item, for example an item template might look like this:
my_item_template.php:
<h3>my item</h3>
<p>i'm an item</p>
when dragging the item i want to replace it with a different template, for example:
my_item_drag_template.php:
<h3>my item</h3>
<p>i'm being dragged</p>
one page may host many different kinds of items, each with its template, its load template, its drop template and so on. my problem is moving all these templates from the server side to the client side.
what i'm doing now - in the server side stage i figure out all the templates that i'll need and include them on the page, hidden (display:none). whenever i need a template (for example when the user starts dragging an item and i need its drag template) i locate it, clone it and use. i'd like to avoid having all this code hidden in my page, maybe store it in a jquery's $(folder).data or something. however, i still need to move it from the php. one option would be to insert the templates to $(folder).data and remove them from the page on page load, but i'd rather avoid it (it adds unnecessary dom manipulation). are there any better ways?
It's certainly an interesting problem, but I don't think you are too far off from a good solution by storing the templates in the dom in a hidden div. Unless you have alot of templates, that generally is a great way to have easy access.
Another option is to ajax request a template when you need it. You can use jQuery's $.load function to get a chunk of html and inject it into an element.
$('<div class="newItem" />')
.load('getTemplate.php?template_id=newItem')
.appendTo('body');
You would obviously have to fill the new element with real data, but you can still do it in a single call.
There is obviously a performance hit by doing this, but the structural gain is pretty significant if you don't mind making the requests. It allows you to define your templates in your backend just like you would a normal page, instead of mucking them all together in a hidden div at the bottom.
I'm working on building up an interface that I want to function as a "tabbed browsing" sort of function. Each of these tabs has already been written as an action and the tabbed interface works fine as links to the individual tabs. I decided to try writing the "index" page for this controller - putting the content of all the tabs into hidden divs and swapping between them with jQuery, but once I started to use the action view helper - I ran into a lot of people saying that its bad practice. (see this article)
Some of these actions build up forms - grab some data from the model, etc to display. I want each of the actions to continue to function on their own (some parse forms as well).
Browsing to /item should give you the tabbed menu, plus all of the div's contents in a hidden tag - where /item/tab2 is a specific action (form submit for instance).
Another complication/caveat - Some of the actions will throw Access Exceptions if the user doesn't have access to that "tab". I'd prefer not to build access checking into the system twice (thus showing a tab with empty content).
I'm just trying to figure out what the best practice is to handle this sort of thing, and I thought that the action helper might be it. If I try to use View Helpers - I start wondering if that is the right place to assemble a Zend_Form.
Does anyone have any suggestions on the "proper" way to work around not using the Zend_View_Helper_Action ?
The Correct way to work around the action view helper, as I stated in the article you cited, is to create partials which access the model directly to fetch the data they need. This can be through a view helper (you make this yourself ;)) if this would involve a lot of logic in your view.
The action view helper is plagued with more than just performance issues, but also creates horrendous debugging nightmares, and if you need it, then your application is probably not following MVC, and therefore, you are using the controller for reuse, instead of the model, which is the patterns intention.
You can render partials from within your layout or current actions view with the render or partial methods of the view object.
If you have multiple actions to deal with multiple possible posts from your tabs, then you should set all of these actions to render the same view script, which will then render all of the tabs with data direct from the model.
If you're not generating the tab/tab panes from existing markup, and you're loading the content on demand, then you simply must check whether the user has permission to access the tab before displaying the tab itself, and again when attempting to load the tab's content.
Checking whether the user has these access permissions should be an acceptable mode of operation and should not be expensive to perform.
If these actions produce content that works in some standalone page, in addition to the tabs, then the Action view helper is the corrent way to proceed. Simply perform the same ACL (or other) check performed in the action when generating the tab.
I'm not entirely sure what your exact problem is, however you can disable the layout:
$this->_helper->layout->disableLayout();
Then the requested Action will just display it's view script, which you can load into the tab.
Any authorisation code you have will function as normal and you can display the requested view script for the Action, or not depending on if they have access.
You can catch any access exceptions by using a try/catch block:
try { // action throwing exceptions } catch (Exception $e) { // catch silently }