Zend Forms and Ext.grid.Panel - json

Question

I am working for a company who use tabulated html/JS interfaces. These are home grown (real honest to god s) with query events attached to each cell. For the old usage they were suitable, but the interactions required between rows and cells are becoming much more complex on the client side. Specifically they want both server and client side validation.
To facilitate this, the devs I report to are super keen on Zend_Forms, and insist that to use a framework like ExtJS, they don't want to have to write back end and front end code twice (please ignore that if it's all home grown they'll have to do this anyway).
So with that in mind, I'm trying to leverage Zend_Form decorators to create Ext.grid.Panel column defintions. For this, I would need to use decorators to export an array (and then json it using the ViewHelper), or render a JSON string directly.
So this would be something like:
$dateElement = new Zend_Form_Element_Text('startDate', array(
'label' => 'Start Date',
'validators' => array(
new Zend_Validate_Date()
)
));
echo (string)$dateElement;
would output:
{ text: 'Start Date', dataIndex:'startDate', xtype:'datecolumn'}
or (obviously not with string cast, but maybe with ->toArray() or something):
array( 'text' => 'Start Date', 'dataIndex' => 'startDate', 'xtype' => 'datecolumn')
I think if I could get it to this stage, I could get what I need out of it.
Has anyone here tried to do anything similiar to this (getting a JSON/XML/other markups output, rather than HTML from Zend_Forms using Decorators) or if they could point me to any resources?

Answer 1

I think I have a solution...
Make a decorator similar to this:
class My_Form_JSON_Decorator extends Zend_Form_Decorator_Abstract{
protected $xtype;
protected $dataIndex;
public function __construct($dataIndex,$xtype){
$this->xtype=$xtype;
$this->dataIndex=$dataIndex;
}
public function render($content){
$element=$this->getElement();
$label=$element->getLabel
//if you need errors here too do the same with $element->getMessages();
return 'array ("text"=>"'.$label.'","dataIndex"=>"'.$this->dataIndex.'","datecolumn"=>"'.$this->xtype.'")';
}
}
Then, on the form, use something similar to this:
$dateElement = new Zend_Form_Element_Text('startDate', array(
'label' => 'Start Date',
'validators' => array(
new Zend_Validate_Date()
)
$dateElement->setDecorators(array(
new My_Form_JSON_Decorator("startDate","datecolumn");
));
And finally, on the View, you should have this:
{
Date: <?php echo $this->form->startDate; ?>,
}
I didn't tried the code above but, I did it with a similar code I used once when I needed to change Decorators of a Form.
It could not be all correct but, I think that it shows you a way of doing that.
Good work =)