ramblings » forms

quickie: setting symfony datetime default

Patrick — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:23:23 +0000

Setting the default value for a symfony form field is one of those tasks so simple that it’s impossible to find out how to do it without a good bit of trial and error. So without further ado, here is how to set a DateTime field’s default value:

$this->widgetSchema['start_time']->setDefault(date("m/d/Y", now()));

Till Next Time

updating symfony form values after submitting

Patrick — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 21:46:36 +0000

One thing that’s made programming on symfony very aggravating has been dealing with the forms. Some sections of the forms are not well documented. The main issue that I have with this at work is that we deal with GPS coordinates and the users enter their coordinates in degree-minute-seconds format but the database saves them in degree-decimal format.

I had googled for a solution to this problem before, but had not found anything to guide me to the answer. The couple answers I had found were not very clear on getting it to work. Till I found this. Following these guidelines I got it to work on a test deployment of symfony. Code below:

class Blog extends BaseBlog {
 
	/**
	 * Initializes internal state of Blog object.
	 * @see        parent::__construct()
	 */
	public function __construct()
	{
		// Make sure that parent constructor is always invoked, since that
		// is where any default values for this object are set.
		parent::__construct();
	}
	/*
	 * this function overrides the BaseBlog::save function to allow
	 * changes to be made to the object before saving to the database
	 */
	public function save(PropelPDO $con = null)
	{
		$this->setCommentCount('11');
		return parent::save($con);
	}
 
}

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Adding javascript to symfony form field

Patrick — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:27:25 +0000

In the users table at my company’s website there are fields for company, division, region, and location. Since each level of the company organization affects all the lower categories I have to filter out the invalid choices when a higher level choice is selected.

I’ve implemented this on some forms that I’ve created manually on the site but not in any forms that I haven’t heavily modified from the stock symfony creation. I started googling around to find a solution but could not find a simple explanation of how to do it. I expected to find at least some information in one of symfony’s otherwise excellent tutorials, but alas, no.

I had a minor epiphany and went digging through the forms API that symfony provides and realized that I should easily be able to do this through the sfWidgetFormPropelChoice method. The second parameter passed is the html attributes for the form field. I thought I had seen a form post here that said that I could add javascript code to the html attributes and not have it get converted into html entities.

I tried throwing a simple alert() inside the onchange attribute for my company box and wham! it worked! So simple. Code below:

new sfWidgetFormPropelChoice(
	array(
		'model' => 'Company',
		'add_empty' => true
	),
	array(
		'onchange' => "filterBy('company', 'division', this.value, 'sf_guard_user_user_division_id');" .
			"filterBy('company', 'region', this.value, 'sf_guard_user_user_region_id');" .
			"filterBy('company', 'location', this.value, 'sf_guard_user_user_location_id');"
	)
)

Till Next Time