Zend_Form - multiple forms on same page - zend-framework

Question

Having multiple forms in one page, when i submit one of them, how can i tell wich one was submitted?
I thought about generating uniqe ids for each from, and saving them as hidden fields and to the user-session - while this is a solution, the problem with it is that there is no good place to remove old ids from the session.
Any better ideas how to solve this problem?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

First of all: have you considered sending the two forms to two different actions? That way you can handle each form separately in an action each. This should be the "best-pratice" if you're using the Zend MVC component.
The other option is to check for the value of the submit button which will be included in the request, e.g.
<input type="submit" name="save" value="form1" />
// in PHP:
// $_POST["save"] will contain "form1"
<input type="submit" name="save" value="form2" />
// in PHP:
// $_POST["save"] will contain "form2"
Be careful as the value-attribute will be rendered as the button's label.
So perhaps you want to distingush the forms by different submit-button names:
<input type="submit" name="save-form1" value="Submit" />
// in PHP:
// $_POST["save-form1"] will contain "Submit"
<input type="submit" name="save-form2" value="Submit" />
// in PHP:
// $_POST["save-form2"] will contain "Submit"
EDIT:
During the comment-dialog between the OP and myself the following seems to be a possible solution:
class My_Form_Base extends Zend_Form
{
private static $_instanceCounter = 0;
public function __construct($options = null)
{
parent:: __construct($options);
self::$_instanceCounter++;
$this->addElement('hidden', 'form-id',
sprintf('form-%s-instance-%d', $this->_getFormType(), self::$_instanceCounter);
}
protected _getFormType()
{
return get_class($this);
}
}
class My_Form_Type1 extends My_Form_Base
{
public function init()
{
// more form initialization
}
}
class My_Form_Type2 extends My_Form_Base
{
public function init()
{
// more form initialization
}
}

Answer 2

some errors in you code, shoudl be something like this:
class Application_Form_Idee_Base extends Zend_Form
{
private static $_instanceCounter = 0;
public function __construct($options = null)
{
parent::__construct($options);
self::$_instanceCounter++;
$this->addElement('hidden', 'form-id', array(
'value' => sprintf('form-%s-instance-%s', $this->_getFormType(), self::$_instanceCounter))
);
}
protected function _getFormType()
{
return get_class($this);
}
}