Howto address specific element from subform and have it displayed correctly with [] - zend-framework

related to this question Zend_Form - Array based elements?
$form = new Zend_Form();
$subForm = new Zend_Form_SubForm();
$subForm->addElement('Text', '1')
->addElement('Text', '2');
$form->addSubForm($subForm, 'element');
$var = '1'; $var2 = '2';
echo $form->getSubForm('element')->$var;
echo $form->getSubForm('element')->$var2;
If I use this way output will wrongly be (or at least not quite expected)
<input type="text" value="" id="1" name="1">
If I use echo $form output will correctly be
<input type="text" value="" id="element-1" name="element[1]">
but I loose flexibility then
I am not saying it's a bug or something just not sure what proper syntax will be.
Thanks

So the answer is rather late, but I recently ran across this issue and though I'd share the reason and possible solutions.
From my research, there are at least 7 bugs in Zend's ticketing system dealing with this problem - though the descriptions vary dramatically.
(SO has prevented me from pasting all of the links, so I'll link one and give you the ticket IDs for the others: ZF-9386, ZF-3567, ZF-9451, ZF-7836, ZF-9409, ZF-7679)
http://framework.zend.com/issues/browse/ZF-10007
The one that best describes the issue, and possible fixes, is 10007 - however, ZF themselves have inexplicably chose not to fix it until 2.0.
The problem stems from the fact that when explicitly using:
$this->form->a->b->c->d notation, d will forget every one of it's ancestor subforms, except for it's immediate "c". When you have a big form with custom behavior, this is quite burdensome because you may want to render the whole subform "d" without calling out it's specific descendents, but you may want it in a certain spot or the Zend Decoraters may not be able to pull it without a bunch of work or at all.
I should think this would be a common problem in the subform world, since by definition you're working with complex forms and excepting the most generic of forms hardly any of it would be linear or clearly separated by dt/dd or other clean markup.
There are three ways I found to deal with this issue.
The first is the fine patch contributed in 10007 - this won't work for me because it only works with printing a subform directly and not individual elements - which is about 50% of my use case. Not knowing ZF well enough, I did not pursue extending this functionality to elements as well.
The second is to forgo all custom html around the elements and add enough decorators to satisfy the layout. Although mine are structured well with TRs/TDs, etc., I just couldn't justify the time nor the decision to 100% ZFify our most complex forms - because someday it could be that ZF would not be the best choice.
The third is a much more cut and dry tradeoff, which is what I chose: I would forgo the convience of being able to echo the $this->form->a->b->c->d subform, and instead individually echo all of my elements in their apppropriate spots (like echo $this->form->a->b->c->d->element1 and echo $this->form->a->b->c->d->element2). This keeps my HTML out of the decorators which has its tradeoffs, but keeps my forms in ZF, which is all I want. With this solution, you can now call setElementsBelongsTo() on the d subform and use array notation to get the submission to behave properly, like so:
$objSubFormD->setElementsBelongTo('[a][b][c]').
Please be mindful that I've dumbed down these examples almost beyond practicality so the (dis)advantages may not be immediately clear for each one, I've only given what I perceive to be options and what I chose as a solution. I also feel my solution gives me the best upgrade path to ZF 2.0.

Related

Mixing and aligning non-Smart fields in a SAPUI 5 Smartform

The attached screen below works just fine but underneath the covers I have a slight problem ^^
Smartform with both simple and smart fields
Behind the view there's a smartform (no annotations used). Field "Agreement Action Type" and the last two pairs of fields are not smartfields (found no "smartcombo" or something similar to use) they are just pairs of labels and comboboxes and here comes the issue. While the smart fields were all perfectly aligned, comboboxes (aka simple fields I suppose) were not aligned along. In order to solve this for the moment, I used a couple of SAPUI5 formatting classes and...width declaration in pixels in the combo definition within the view. Results works fine, even in different size monitors but, even though I'm currently in the process of learning and understanding the technology, I already know that the latter is a crime against SAPUI5. Is there a way to align smart and simple fields in the same view (or an equivalent dropdown control for smartforms alternatively) or I will have eventually to get rid of my smartform (losing small bonuses like the togglable attribute) and use a simple form instead?
Thanks for taking time to read it.
Regards,
Greg
The GroupElement aggregation manages the SmartLabel for you so try to remove the label inside the GroupElement aggregation like this:
<smartForm:GroupElement label="Label">
<Input type="Text" value="someValue"/>
</smartForm:GroupElement>
On the contrary, if you want to change the appearence of your SmartField, you can use ControlType to configure the internal control.

cfinsert is picking up my search input field in a different form

When I submit my form I am getting an error from my cfinsert function because there is not a database column name "SEARCHFIELD". The problem is "SEARCHFIELD" is not an input in the form I am submitting.
Both forms have close and open tags so I am not sure why my search form input is being referenced in my main forms submission?
Any thoughts?
Two ways I can think of to avoid this, without seeing your actual code it is hard to guess where SEARCHFIELD is coming from. As some of the comments pointed out it would most likely be from a CFPARAM or the name of your submit button in the form.
The first way you could tackle this is the CFINSERT tag has an attribute named formfields where you can list off the columns you wish to insert with. You can see that here in this doc link:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec22c24-7c78.html
Another way you could do this is you could add code to remove SEARCHFIELD from the FORM scope prior to running the CFINSERT. Which would be as simple as:
<cfset StructDelete(FORM, "SEARCHFIELD") />
You could check to see if it exists and if so then delete it but the StructDelete() will run without issues even if the field does not exist.
I personally do not use CFINSERT/CFUPDATE and I know the default opinion in the community is not to. They do have some benefits though that often are overlooked in that they do parameterise the SQL and offer at least some safety from malicious people. Without knowing anything about what you are doing it is hard to say if using them is actually a shot in your foot in the long run or something just fine to be doing.

AngularJS - Wrapping nested <select> in a <div> in a form makes its control not be bind anymore

I'm doing a kind of select2 but with much less functionality and we want the form that is above to know about this Control (so we can use $dirty and $invalid).
But I've noted that if you wrap the select that is in the directive's HTML with a div, the $dirty and $invalid of that control stop working. Any idea why ?
Try it out on this http://plnkr.co/edit/UV425G2SMcqRYeX2N4qw?p=preview, go to the select.html file and turn
<select class='form-control' ng-model='selectedval' ng-attr-name='{{name}}' ng-options='item as item.name for item in options' required><option value=''>-- select --</option></select>
into
<div>
<select class='form-control' ng-model='selectedval' ng-attr-name='{{name}}' ng-options='item as item.name for item in options' required><option value=''>-- select --</option></select>
</div>
Ok I asked this as well in https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/6862 and got this answer by #caitp:
So your test case is actually running an old version of angular, which
A) does not support the ng-attr-* directives, and B) has a broken
isolate scope implementation.
This is still broken, but in different ways, using angular 1.2.15. You
have a priority issue with the ng-attr-name directive, regardless of
where the control is, and so it gets added to the form
control with the name you aren't expecting.
The reason this "works" with 1.0.8 and without wrapping it in a div,
is because with replace: true in your directive, we merge the
attributes from the directive's compile node (which does contain
name="...") into the root node of the template, so you're sort of
accidentally taking advantage of a poorly documented behaviour of the
compiler, in that case.
Unfortunately, there isn't really a good way to have dynamic form
control names yet (and this is really the root of the problem you're
having), there are a number of PRs adding support for this, and I've
written a hack to decorate the ngModel controller to make this work
(although it might not work anymore, depending on if the new
$interpolate api landed yet or not), you can see that at
http://plnkr.co/edit/hSMzWC?p=preview
So, Matias has an alternative solution for this, it's not clear which
one is going to land --- but in any case, that's about what your issue
is.
In the future it would be good to ask about these on
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=angularjs or
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/angular to get answers to
these kinds of support questions (this is not a bug, per se, although
the "issue" you're seeing might be documented better, so PRs welcome
for clarifying that in the compiler docs).

Trying to replace content zones in typo3

What I'm aiming to do!
I'm creating a template for a site in typo3, and i'd like to get rid of typo3's default content zones, and replace them with my own.
I.E. On the page menu.
to remove left, content, border
and to keep/add. Header. Main. Right.
The problem!
I've found snippets around the web, and bluntly, what I'm expecting to happen, isn't happening. Where every post seems to be "Thank you, great success! ++", the code I paste isn't throwing any errors, and isn't doing anything, well, at all.
My attempt
Via the typo3 documentation http://typo3.org/documentation/snippets/sd/24/
I call mod.SHARED.colPos_list in order to choose the three sections to display
t3lib_extMgm::addPageTSConfig('
mod.SHARED.colPos_list = 0,1,3
');
And I edit the TCA in extTables.php to set them to my specs.
$TCA["tt_content"]["columns"]["colPos"]["config"]["items"] = array (
"1" => array ("Header||Header||||||||","1"),
"0" => array ("Main||Main||||||||","0"),
"3" => array ("Right||Right||||||||","3"),
);
extTables.php is being called as as a die(); cuts the page.
I've cleared the cache and deleted typo3temp, logged out and in again.
But nothing happens.
My main guess, is, is this feature anything to do with templavoila? I removed it as I felt like trying out the new(er) typo3 fluid templating system, and didn't feel that I needed a GUI editor.
Any ideas?
Well - the more pages and content elements you got the more problems you will have to face when using TemplaVoila. Having comma separated values in XML structures saved to a single database field will be a performance killer as soon as you want to collect content from more than one page (uncached teaser menus or the like). Handling of references and "unused elements" is questionable as well. Of course it will work for small to medium sites, but concept wise a clean approach looks different.
Backend layouts are available since TYPO3 4.5 and work flawlessly since they just represent a normalized relation between elements and pages based on colPos. If you need more, Grid Elements will take this principle to the next level, offering even nested structures but still based on normalized relations, which will make your life much easier when it comes to DB cleaning and other maintenance tasks.
Find an introduction to backend layouts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsxfNd4TYbk
Instead of removing default columns you can just rename them...
TIP: Use TemplaVoila extension for templating, you'll find much more flexibility there.

What's the best/most RESTful way to simulate a procedure call over HTTP?

I have a service that takes an .odt template file and some text values, and produces an .odt as it's output. I need to make this service available via HTTP, and I don't quite know what is the most RESTful way to make the interface work.
I need to be able to supply the template file, and the input values, to the server - and get the resulting .odt file sent back to me. The options I see for how this would work are:
PUT or POST the template to the server, then do a GET request, passing along the URI of the template I just posted, plus the input values - the GET response body would have the .odt
Send the template and the parameters in a single GET request - the template file would go in the GET request body.
Like (2) above except do the whole thing as a single POST request instead of GET.
The problem with (1) is that I do not want to store the template file on the server. This adds complexity and storing the file is not useful to me beyond the fact that it's a very RESTful approach. Also, a single request would be better than 2, all other things being equal.
The problem with (2) is that putting a body in a GET request is bordering on abuse of HTTP - it is supported by the software I'm using now, but may not always be.
Number (3) seems misleading since this is more naturally a 'read' or 'get' operation than a 'post'.
What I am doing is inherently like a function call - I need to pass a significant amount of data in, and I am really just using HTTP as a convenient way of exposing my code across the network. Perhaps what I'm trying to do is inherently un-RESTful, and there is no REST-friendly solution? Can anyone advise? Thank you!
Wow, so this answer escalated quickly...
Over the last year or so I've attempted to gain a much better understanding of REST through books, mailing lists, etc. For some reason I decided to pick your question as a test of what I've learned.
Sorry :P
Let's make this entire example one step simpler. Rather than worry about the user uploading a file, we'll instead assume that the user just passes a string. So, really, they are going to pass a string, in addition to the arguments of characters to replace (a list of key/values). We'll deal with the file upload part later.
Here's a RESTful way of doing it which doesn't require anything to be stored on the server. I will use some HTML (albeit broken, I'll leave out stuff like HEAD) as my media type, just because it's fairly well known.
A Sample Solution
First, the user will need to access our REST service.
GET /
<body>
<a rel="http://example.com/rels/arguments" href="/arguments">
Start Building Arguments
</a>
</body>
This basically gives the user a way to start actually interacting with our service. Right now they have only one option: use the link to build a new set of arguments (the name/value pairings that will eventually be used to in the string replacement scheme). So the user goes to that link.
GET /arguments
<body>
<a rel="self" href="/arguments"/>
<form rel="http://example.com/rels/arguments" method="get" action="/arguments?{key}={value}">
<input id="key" name="key" type="text"/>
<input id="value" name="value" type="text"/>
</form>
<form rel="http://example.com/rels/processed_string" action="/processed_string/{input_string}">
<input id="input_string" name="input_string" />
</form>
</body>
This brings us to an instance of an "arguments" resource. Notice that this isn't a JSON or XML document that returns to you just the plain data of the key/value pairings; it is hypermedia. It contains controls that direct the user to what they can do next (sometimes referred to allowing the user to "follow their nose"). This specific URL ("/arguments") represents an empty list of key/value pairings. I could very well have named the url "/empty_arguments" if I wanted to: this is an example why it's silly to think about REST in terms of URLs: it really shouldn't matter what the URL is.
In this new HTML, the user is given three different resources that they can navigate to:
They can use the link to "self" to navigate to same resource they are currently on.
They can use the first form to navigate to a new resource which represents an argument list with the additional name/value pairing that they specify in the form.
They can use the second form to provide the string that they wish to finally do their replacement on.
Note: You probably noticed that the second form has a strange "action" url:
/arguments?{key}={value}
Here, I cheated: I'm using URI Templates. This allows me to specify how the arguments are going to be placed onto the URL, rather than using the default HTML scheme of just using <input-name>=<input-value>. Obviously, for this to work, the user can't use a browser (as browsers don't implement this): they would need to use software that understands HTML and URI templating. Of course, I'm using HTML as an example, your REST service could use some kind of XML that supports URI Templating as defined by the URI Template spec.
Anyway, let's say the user wants to add their arguments. The user uses the first form (e.g., filling in the "key" input with "Author" and the "value" input with "John Doe"). This results in...
GET /arguments?Author=John%20Doe
<body>
<a rel="self" href="/arguments?Author=John%20Doe"/>
<form rel="http://example.com/rels/arguments" method="get" action="/arguments?Author=John%20Doe&{key}={value}">
<input id="key" name="key" type="text"/>
<input id="value" name="value" type="text"/>
</form>
<form rel="http://example.com/rels/processed_string" action="/processed_string/{input_string}?Author=John%20Doe">
<input id="input_string" name="input_string" />
</form>
</body>
This is now a brand new resource. You can describe it as an argument list (key/value pairs) with a single key/value pair: "Author"/"John Doe". The HTML is pretty much the same as before, with a few changes:
The "self" link now points to current resources URL (changed from "/arguments" to "/arguments?Author=John%20Doe"
The "action" attribute of the first form now has the longer URL, but once again we use URI Templates to allow us to build a larger URI.
The second form
The user now wants to add a "Date" argument, so they once again submit the first form, this time with key of "Date" and a value of "2003-01-02".
GET /arguments?Author=John%20Doe&Date=2003-01-02
<body>
<a rel="self" href="/arguments?Author=John%20Doe&Date=2003-01-02"/>
<form rel="http://example.com/rels/arguments" method="get" action="/arguments?Author=John%20Doe&Date=2003-01-02&{key}={value}">
<input id="key" name="key" type="text"/>
<input id="value" name="value" type="text"/>
</form>
<form rel="http://example.com/rels/processed_string" action="/processed_string/{input_string}?Author=John%20Doe">
<input id="input_string" name="input_string" />
</form>
</body>
Finally, the user is ready to process their string, so they use the second form and fill in the "input_string" variable. This once again uses URI Templates, thus having bringing the user to the next resource. Let's say that that the string is the following:
{Author} wrote some books in {Date}
The results would be:
GET /processed_string/%7BAuthor%7D+wrote+some+books+in+%7BDate%7D?Author=John%20Doe&Date=2003-01-02
<body>
<a rel="self" href="/processed_string/%7BAuthor%7D+wrote+some+books+in+%7BDate%7D?Author=John%20Doe&Date=2003-01-02">
<span class="results">John Doe wrote some books in 2003-01-02</span>
</body>
PHEW! That's a lot of work! But it's (AFAIC) RESTful, and it fulfills the requirement of not needing to actually store ANYTHING on the server side (including the argument list, or the string that you eventually want to process).
Important Things to Note
One thing that is important here is that I wasn't just talking about URLs. In fact, the majority of time, I'm talking about the HTML. The HTML is the hypermedia, that that's is such a huge part of REST that is forgotten about. All those APIs that say they are "restful" where they say "do a GET on this URL with these parameters and POST on this URL with a document that looks like this" are not practicing REST. Roy Fielding (who literally wrote the book on REST) made this observation himself.
Another thing to note is that it was quite a bit of pain to just set up the arguments. After the initial GET / to get to the root (you can think of it as the "menu") of the service, you would need to do five more GET calls just to build up your argument resource to make an argument resource of four key/value pairings. This could be alleviated by not using HTML. For example, I already did use URI Templates in my example, there's no reason to say that HTML just isn't good enough for REST. Using a hypermedia format (like some derivation of XML) that supports something similar to forms, but with the ability to specify "mappings" of values, you could do this in one go. For example, we could extend the HTML media type to allow another input type called "mappings"...
So long as the client using our API understands what a "mappings" input type is, they will be able to build their arguments resource with a single GET.
At that point, you might not even need an "arguments" resource. You could just skip right to the "processed_string" resource that contains the mapping and the actual string...
What about file upload?
Okay, so originally you mentioned file uploads, and how to get this without needing to store the file. Well, basically, we can use our existing example, but replace the last step with a file.
Here, we are basically doing the same thing as before, except we are uploading a file. What is important to note is that now we are hinting to the user (through the "method" attribute on the form) that they should do a POST rather than a GET. Note that even though everywhere you hear that POST is a non-safe (it could cause changes on the server), non-idempotent operation, there is nothing saying that it MUST be change state on the server.
Finally, the server can return the new file (even better would be to return some hypermedia or LOCATION header with a link to the new file, but that would require storage).
Final Comments
This is just one take on this specific example. While I hope you have gained some sort of insight, I would caution you to accept this as gospel. I'm sure there have been things that I have said that are not really "REST". I plan on posting this question and answer to the REST-Discuss Mailing List and see what others have to say about it.
One main thing I hope to express through this is that your easiest solution might simply be to use RPC. After all, what was your original attempt at making it RESTful attempting to accomplish? If you are trying to be able to tell people that you accomplish "REST", keep in mind that plenty of APIs have claimed themself "RESTful" that have really just been RPC disguised by URLs with nouns rather than verbs.
If it was because you have heard some of the benefits of REST, and how to gain those benefits implicitly by making your API RESTful, the unfortunate truth is that there's more to REST than URLs and whether you GET or POST to them. Hypermedia plays a huge part.
Finally, sometimes you will encounter issues that mean you might do things that SEEM non-RESTful. Perhaps you need to do a POST rather than a GET because the URI (which have a theoretical infinite amount of storage, but plenty of technical limitations) would get too long. Well then, you need to do POST. Maybe
More resources:
REST-Discuss
My e-mail on this answer to REST-Discuss
RESTful Web Services Cookbook
Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node (Not specifically about REST, but a VERY good introduction to Hypermedia)
What you are doing is not REST-ful - or, at least, is difficult to express in REST, because you are thinking about the operation first, not the objects first.
The most REST-ful expression would be to create a new "OdtTemplate" resource (or get the URI of an existing one), create a new "SetOfValues" resource, then create a "FillInTemplateWithValues" job resource that was tied to both those inputs, and which could be read to determine the status of the job, and to obtain a pointer to the final "FilledInDocument" object that contained your result.
REST is all about creating, reading, updating, and destroying objects. If you can't model your process as a CRUD database, it isn't really REST. That means you do need to, eg, store the template on the server.
You might be better off, though, just implementing an RPC over HTTP model, and submitting the template and values, then getting the response synchronously - or one of the other non-REST patterns you named... since that is just what you want.
If there is no value in storing the templates then option 2 is the most RESTful, but as you are aware there is the possibility of having your GET body dropped.
However, if I was a user of this system, I would find it very wasteful to have to upload the template each time I would like to populate it with values. Instead it would seem more appropriate to have the template stored and allow different requests with different values to populate the resulting documents.