Form Generation Library

[eluser]Ollie Rattue[/eluser]
[quote author="macigniter" date="1239245438"]I am a little scared that some of you will tear me apart if they look at the source code and find horrible programming techniques hopefully we can all make this library better and i will learn from all of you.[/quote]

Release early, release often

I built something similiar called FormIgniter and so am really interested to see how this library works out. I was thinking about building a library like this but it ended up turning into a kind of webapp formigniter.org

[eluser]shreder[/eluser]
Definitely interested!

Keep us posted mate

[eluser]macigniter[/eluser]
Alright!! I am releasing a VERY EARLY PRE-RELEASE BETA ;-)

I am using it in one of my projects and constantly change stuff when I see some bugs or unlogical things come up. Also the script still throws quite some notices which is on my to-do list to clean up the code and make it not only look prettier, but also better.

Since so many of you wanted to give it a shot I thought I'd post this library even though I haven't been able to finish the user guide yet.

I did take some time to create a welcome controller that includes a form with lots of comments on the usage of the library.

NOTE: I would prefer if you sent bugs or code improvements directly to my email address at [email protected]

Thanks for beta testing and for your patience. I hope you enjoy the library!

Download Form Generation Library [Link removed, please refer to the current version in the first post!]

Please read the config file section in the user guide that explains the configuration options in detail!

Link to the online version: Example Form
Link to the user guide: User Guide (not yet completely finished)

Feedback is welcome! (only if it isn't about the bad coding ;-))

[eluser]shreder[/eluser]
Wow, thanks!

I will test it and let you know any bugs I find.
Just a quick question:

How would I repopulate fields? especially a radio field?

Thanks!

[eluser]macigniter[/eluser]
What exactly do you mean by "re"populate? Please take a look at the user guide (see link in post above) and let me know if that answers your question.

[eluser]Kyle Johnson[/eluser]
I really like seeing your code, though I haven't had the chance to dig through it thoroughly.

It gives me a lot of reasons to learn all about PHP. There is a lot of code in it!

I did run into some small issues with my custom Form_validation that was specifically built to help with array inputs like "email[]" but it seems like you have taken care of that within your code, so I just had to remove my Form_validation / Form_helper

Great work so far! I'm betting this could be included within the next major release of CI if you feel confident enough in your code by then.

[eluser]macigniter[/eluser]
Kyle, the library automatically populates all "checkgroups", "radiogroups" and "selects" as arrays, no need to add [] after the name. In return all data returned from checkgroups, radiogroups and selects are arrays. So if you want to access a submitted value from a group of checkboxes you will have to do something like:

Code:

...

->select('size', $sizes, 'Your size', 'medium')

...

$selected = $this->input->post('size');

echo $selected[0]; // will output the selected size

In a multiple select field or in checkgroups the array contains all selected/checked values.

Btw... I haven't really thought about using arrays in regular text inputs yet. Never really used that feature in any of my forms. But it made me think when you wrote email[] in your example. I guess if you want to use arrays for text fields you still need to add the '[]', otherwise the form won't know you want to use an array of fields. Haven't tried if that works, though. Let me know if it does...

[eluser]Kyle Johnson[/eluser]
You might be hearing a lot from me, I've been designing the backend of our web application for a while, and am now into the form generation bit.

One thing I noticed is that if I add an 'onchange="this.form.submit()"' event to any of my selects, then when the form submits, the old data does not repopulate the form.

I may end up using some AJAX to do the changing bits in the future, and I'm sure that would work, but I usually start out with quick solutions.

Fun fun!

[eluser]macigniter[/eluser]
Thanks for the notice. I will change the script to work with 'onchange="this.form.submit()"' in the next release. I'll put it on my to-do list :-)

[eluser]gregor4711[/eluser]
Hi,
exactly what I'm searching for.

I know it is pre beta, but 3 questions:
- how can I integrate A HTML editor like tinyMCE?
- how can I integrate a date picker?
- how con a setup a form with cascaded drop down boxes?

my be it is already planed from your side for the next release.

Many thanks,
Gregor