There are times when the ordinary decorators just is not enough for your forms. I had one project where we used clickable images to affect the contents of our form element. These images needed to be embedded into the form. Doing this with decorators turned out to be complicated so we used custom view scripts instead. It gave much more readable code.

Here is a small example in Zend Framework 1.10

First we need a form (application/forms/Login.php):

class Application_Form_Login extends Zend_Form {

    public function init() {

        $this->setName('login');

        $email = new Zend_Form_Element_Text('email');
        $email->addValidator('EmailAddress')
                ->setRequired(true)
                ->addFilter('StripTags')
                ->addFilter('StringTrim');

        $pass = new Zend_Form_Element_Password('pass');
        $pass ->setRequired(true)
                ->addFilter('StripTags')
                ->addFilter('StringTrim');

        $submit = new Zend_Form_Element_Submit('login');
        $submit->setLabel('Login');      

        $this->addElements(array($email, $pass, $submit));
    }
}

Then we create the view script (application/views/scripts/index/loginForm.phtml):

    

        

            
Login/E-mail: 
            
element->email ?>
        
        

            
Password: 
            
            
<?php echo $this->element->pass ?>
        
        

        
<?php echo $this->element->login ?>
        
    

And finally we link them together. First we set the the path to the view script in the form (application/forms/Login.php). I do this because I do not want to put it in the default location (application/view/scripts)

...
$this->setDecorators(array(
      array('viewScript', array('viewScript' => 'index/loginForm.phtml'))
      ));
...

Then we tell the elements that they are going to use the script when rendering (application/forms/Login.php)

...
$email->addValidator('EmailAddress')
           ->setDecorators(array('ViewHelper'))
           ->setRequired(true)
...
...
$pass ->setRequired(true)
          ->setDecorators(array('ViewHelper'))
          ->addFilter('StripTags')
...

That’s it!

This validator was added in Zend Framework 1.10.5 and it has the ability to check if two fields are identical. Very useful for checking that the confirm password field contains the same characters as the password e.g. in a create account form. As with all the standard Zend validators this is very simple

...
$password = new Zend_Form_Element_Password('password');
$password->setLabel('Password:')
         ->setRequired(true)
         ->addFilter('StripTags')
         ->addFilter('StringTrim')
         ->setAttrib('size', '20')
         ->addValidator('StringLength', false, array(3, 30));

$confirm = new Zend_Form_Element_Password('confirm');
$confirm->setLabel('Confirm password:')
        ->setRequired(true)
        ->addFilter('StripTags')
        ->addFilter('StringTrim')
        ->setAttrib('size', '20')
        ->addValidator('StringLength', false, array(3, 30))
        ->addValidator('Identical', false, array('token' => 
                     'password', 'messages' => 
                     array(Zend_Validate_Identical::NOT_SAME => 
                     'Passwords does not match'));
...

Here I have added the Identical validator to the confirm element. The ‘token’ is the element name of the field to check, in this case the element above called ‘password’.

To set a custom error message you just set the Zend_Validate_Identical::NOT_SAME variable. This will show if the passwords in the two fields does not match. You can also set the Zend_Validate_Identical::MISSING_TOKEN to a message to show if no password was entered.

Quite often you need to redirect to another controller/action after a decision in the controller. Sometimes you need to redirect to a whole different site. This is how I do redirects in Zend Framework 1.10:

Redirect to another controller and/or action
For this I use the Zend_Controller_Action_Helper function redirector(action, controller name)

$this->_helper->redirector('display', 'index');

This will redirect to the displayAction in the indexController

Redirect to another site
For this I use the Zend_Controller_Action function redirect(url). The redirect function takes an full url as input (you can also supply an array with redirect options)

$this->_redirect('http://framework.zend.com/');

This will redirect you to the Zend Framework site