Database aware Select elements for Zend_Form (or Extending Zend_Form_Element_Multi)

In this article, you will know how you can extend select form element that comes with Zend Framework, to be easily filled with data from your database table. We want to be able to easily fill select elements from database table with less repetitive code. It's already easy to fill select elements with database data out of the box:

$db = Zend_Db_Table_Abstract::getDefaultAdapter();
$options = $db->fetchPairs(
   $db->select()->from('table_name', array('id', 'display_field'))
     ->order('some_field ASC'), 'id');
$form->getElement('someelement')->AddMultiOptions($options);

In the snippet above you get default database adapter, then simply fetch all items from 'table_name' ordering by 'some_field', and you see we fetch them as pairs binding to 'id' field. This basically means that the result of fetchPairs returns associative array of items. For select control options, we just want two fields: one for the display and one for the values ('id' is the value field, 'display_field' is for display)

But what if you have many database aware select controls? How is it possible to extend Zend Framework select elements with an easy method to populate data from database table?

Read on for details.

Last Updated ( Sunday, 03 October 2010 )

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