David Kelly

More on the ongoing struggle with the Zend Framework’s documentation….

After much trawling of the Zend Framework Manual, ZF on Nabble, and Google, I finally tracked down how to include & manipulate radio buttons using Zend_Form (ZF 1.5).

The HTML code I was trying to output was something along the lines of:

<input type="radio" value="1" name="staff" /> <label>Jim</label> <br/>
<input type="radio" value="2" name="staff" /> <label>John</label>


Apparently, to do this the setMultiOptions needs to be used, although that this is required is not made clear in the Zend_Form Documentation. To do it:

Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Form');
Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Form_Element_Radio');
$form = new Zend_Form;

$staffname = array('Jim', 'John');
$staff = new Zend_Form_Element_Radio('staff');
$staff->setRequired(true)  // field required
->setValue('R') // first radio button selected
->setMultiOptions($staffname);  // add array of values / labels for radio group
$form->addElement($staff);

However, I also needed to specify the value attribute of each of the radio buttons. To set this value, the key value of the array being passed into setMultiOptions is used. So, for example,

$options = StaffTable::getStaff();  // get staff details from StaffTable
$staffname = array();
foreach($options as $st){
$staffname[$st['staff_id']] = $st['staff_name']; // set staff_id as the key
}

This is retrieving a recordset of staff id’s and staff names for use in the radio button group. It uses the value of staff_id for the key value of the $staffname array.  This will then be used as the value in the radio buttons. So if this $staffname array is passed into setMultiOptions, the output is: (note: the staff_id values for Jim and John were 32 and 28 respectively)


<label style="white-space: nowrap;"><input name="staff" type="radio" value="32" />Jim</label>
<label style="white-space: nowrap;"><input name="staff" type="radio" value="28" />John</label>

During all my searching, it seems that there’s an acknowledgement (but some frustration) that the documentation for certain parts of the framework (such as Zend_Form) is lacking in both detail and useful examples. That said, I’ve been finding it pretty useful despite the learning curve and the occasionally long bouts of searching the web to solve problems…