Zend Form: How do I make it bend to my will?

Question

I\'ve read the manual many times, I\'ve scoured the posts offered by Google on the subject, I have even bought a couple of books that deal with ZF. Now, why am I still confused?

Answer 1

To add to what was said:

Dont be afraid of the decorators, you'll be using them lots if you decide to stick with Zend_Form. It's fairly straightforward once you 'get it', unfortunately the docs are weak and playing with it is almost the only way to get there.

The ViewScript and ViewHelper decorators give you lots of power.

Don't be afraid to dig through the source for the different decorators that exist and see how they're doing things (I gained a fair amount of insight comparing the original decorators with the dojo ones).

I think what Sean was suggesting is that you don't need to call form->render, you can use something like this in your viewscript.

I worked on one project (pre Zend_Form) where we built sets of validators and used standard viewscripts all the way through. It was a little more work (plumbing for error messages and the like), but not excessive compared to creating elements with Zend_Form.