Symfony2 - Customizing buttons out of forms - forms

Question

I have problem with forms and page layouts. I render my page by:
{% block body -%}
{{ form(edit_form, {'style': 'horizontal'}) }}
<ul class="record_actions">
<li>
<a href="{{ path('organization') }}">
<button type="button" class="btn btn-default">Back to the list</button>
</a>
</li>
<li>
{{ form(delete_form) }}
</li>
</ul>
{% endblock %}
I have some style on ul record_actions. It looks like this: http://postimg.org/image/sby8jnojz/
My problem is with update button. I would like to put it into <ul> tags with 2 other buttons. Is there some possibility to put it outside of form? I like, how the form looks with {{ form(edit_form, {'style': 'horizontal'}) }}. So I wouldn't like to customize every part by {{form_widget}}. Or is there possibility to render all form and then render just this button?

Answer 1

Updated answer
Let's take a hypothetical controller method - where I have defined two forms edit_form and delete_form. Don't worry about these too much, they are just proof of concept. The important thing here is that I have two forms that I am sending to the template to be rendered:
// Foo\BarBundle\Controller\BazController
public function editAction()
{
// a placeholder 'edit' form
$editForm = $this->createFormBuilder()
->add('name', 'text')
->add('email', 'email')
->add('send', 'submit')
->getForm();
// a placeholder 'delete' form
$deleteForm = $this->createFormBuilder(['id' => 1])
->add('id', 'hidden')
->getForm();
// assign form views to template
return [
'edit_form' => $editForm->createView(),
'delete_form' => $deleteForm->createView(),
];
}
Next the template. We have two forms to render: edit_form and delete_form. There are a couple of issues we need to consider - rendering a form within a form is not allowed so we cannot render delete_form inside edit_form or vice versa.
However we can, as I explained below, with the HTML5 form attribute place form elements outside of a <form> context and still link them to that form (with the aforementioned IE* limitations). So let's do that, and suggest a workaround in due course.
The least invasive thing to do is to render the delete_form after the edit_form but place the edit_form delete button inside edit_form.
I don't know if you are using a CSS framewok to help you with layout - I am assuming Bootstrap 2.* here so you might have to update your markup - either way the idea should be clear enough:
<div class="row">
{{ form_start(edit_form, {'attr': {'id': 'edit-form'}}) }}
<div class="span4">
<ul class="record_actions">
<li>{{ form_widget(edit_form.send)}}</li>
<li><button id="delete-form-submit" form="delete-form">
Delete
</button>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="span4">
{{ form_rest(edit_form) }}
</div>
{{ form_end(edit_form) }}
</div>
{{ form(delete_form, {'attr': {'id': 'delete-form'}, 'method': 'GET'}) }}
The above HTML yields a layout similar to the following:
A few points of explanation:
I have created a two-column layout for the form. The .record_actions buttons are rendered on the left column - this is essential - but they are floated right using Bootstrap's .pull-right in this case.
Update button: the first thing I want to do is render the submit button in ul.record_actions where I want it: <li>{{ form_widget(edit_form.send)}}</li>
Delete button: I have not defined a submit button on the delete_form because I want to explicitly create it outside of the context of the delete_form, instead placing it where I have. Note that I defined a form attribute on this element called delete-form. This links this element to delete_form instead of edit_form: <li><button id="delete-form-submit" form="delete-form">Delete</button></li>
Remaining fields: in the second column I can dump all the remaining edit_form fields implicitly with {{ form_rest(edit_form) }}, as per #Kix's suggestion!
Delete form Finally, we render the delete_form outside the edit_form with {{ form(delete_form, {'attr': {'id': 'delete-form'}, 'method': 'GET'}) }}. A couple of things to note here - we are explicitly adding an id for the form with {'attr': {'id': 'delete-form'}. This is important as it is the attribute that the delete button refers to. In this case I also added 'method': 'GET' to test on my machine. You will probably want to leave this out (in which case it defaults to POST)
There you have it... This should help you define your preferred layout.
But, we still need to address IE. If you are using jQuery, you could add a click handler to the delete button, which we've assigned the id #delete-form-submit. Note that the following is a suggestion and is not tested:
$(function() {
if ($.browser.msie) { // #see: http://api.jquery.com/jquery.browser/
$('#delete-form-submit').on('click', function(e) {
e.preventDefault();
$('#delete-form').submit();
});
});
});
Now you need to worry about IE users with JS disabled... or not! ;) Hope this helps.
Original answer
I would argue that your issue is possible Symfony agnostic... Let me explain:
Do you create your form's submit button with the form builder? I assume so since you do not explicitly create one in the twig snippet you pasted above.
This is totally fine of course. I usually just define my Twig form templates like so, which I gather is the older way to do it (since the 2.4 docs don't appear to suggest the following):
<form class="form-horizontal" action="{{ path('foo_edit') }}" method="post" {{ form_enctype(edit_form) }}>
{{ form_widget(edit_form) }}
<input type="submit">
</form>
This way is totally acceptable in my view - you just don't define the submit button.
Of course this does not solve your problem, because you want to "break out" of the form. But you can actually do this with HTML5 with the form attribute, which allows you to link disparate tags to a specific tag. A generic example:
<form id="foo">
<label>Username</label>
<input type="text" name="username">
</form>
<ul>
<li><input type="submit" form="foo">
</ul>
Note that the submit button is outside form#foo but the form attribute still links to it.
Obviously its usefulness is restricted to the range of browsers you want to support, as it's a HTML5 feature.
EDIT
I checked - it has pretty wide browser support, except.... drumroll IE. Up to and including IE10 apparently. I would assume that this is a dealbreaker unfortunately.
kix's approach above could work well however, print out the individual form widgets you want explicitly and then use form_rest. I would add to this and say it might not exactly work with the HTML layout you have above - iirc you have to print out any fields explicitly before you call form_rest.

Answer 2

You can always render some widgets in places specific to your layout using
{{ form_widget(delete_form.yourWidgetName) }}
and then let Symfony complete the form with
{{ form_rest(delete_form) }}