FuelPHP Forums

Hello, Introduction
Once again, I'm pushing Fuel to the limits (we all love it!).
I'm working on overriding form, fieldset and fields to create a new, more powerful form generation base on model properties. Here is a quick screenshot to show you what I generated automatically for now.
http://www.novius-labs.com/data/photo/45.png So you can see the password field is rendered as 2 separate lines (each one has it's own label and input). And the date field is rendered as 3 inputs (2 text and a select). I don't need to show the code from the Model, it's easy eanough to understand: I just added a 'widget' index in the field properties to know if a widget has to be used for rendering (rather than a standard fieldset_field). Other keys such as "label" and "validation" remains the same.
Rendering & populating widgets
I added a new notion called "widget" to allow this. It's used to manipulate one value (1 field from the model) using several fields in the form. For example, I have a Widget_Date class which can be used to manipulate the Date type fields. It renders the field as 3 separates input (text for the day, select for the month and text for the year) and validates them accordingly. What I named "widget" is made of several fields, so I needed a way to :
- populare and repopulated the widget based on several POST values.
- build and render the fields accordingly The major modification I made was in the fieldset class : https://gist.github.com/1277711
It delegates the population of the widget to the widget itself, which can all use the values it needs from the POST array. I needed one small tweak to the form class : https://gist.github.com/1277723
It delegates the building of the widget to the widget itself. So until there, all is pretty smooth and works well. Validation widget fields
What I struggle the most with, and I'm the less convinced about is the validation part. I'll take an example to explain it.
I have a "Password" widget. It displays two input type=password to take care of the verification part. Validation needs to check that both fields are set and matches. From the model perspective it's still a unique password field. My main problem was (is) that when adding a field for validation it also adds a field to the fieldset. I cannot say "I know my form will contains a field named 'whatever' and I want you to check that the value validates". In what I did, the form doesn't necessarily know what will be displayed, because it's sometimes delegated to the widget.A widget can display several input and are seen from the model / form point of view as a unique field (the widget). Here is the password Widget I created : https://gist.github.com/1277747 The Widget_Empty doesn't do anything. It just return an empty string when build, so nothing is displayed in the form. But I needed that to add validation rules without really adding a field because I manage it myself. Discussion
I explained my problem and how I tried to overcome it. As I'm not completely satisfied I made this post to get feedback and disuss how this can be achieved differently. Or even how can we make Fuel evolve to make this easier. Thanks in advance for everyone who'll take part on this discussion.