Standalone Forms and Validation

Update : I wrote a very minimal approach here

Recently Aura.Input was tagged Beta1. I would like to show you how you can use Aura.Input, Aura.Filter and Aura.View to create form.

The Aura.Input itself contains a basic filter implementation. As shown in earlier post Aura Turns 2

But in this post let us use the power of Aura.Filter. As Aura.Input doesn’t have a rendering capability you may need to use Aura.View as templating system ( see Using Aura.View ) or use the helper classes provided by Aura.View ( see below Without using Aura.View completely ) or create your own helper classes to render the same from the hints ( see Hints for the view ).

The whole example is in https://github.com/harikt/phpform repo. If you don’t have composer, you can download it from http://getcomposer.org and install the dependencies via composer.

In a nut shell

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git clone https://github.com/harikt/phpform
cd phpform
php composer.phar install
php -S localhost:8000 web/index.php

Point your browser to the url http://localhost:8000

Let us look into some details

Inorder to use Aura.Filter with Aura.Input we need to implement the Aura\Input\FilterInterface.

This is just extending the Aura\Filter\RuleCollection and implementing the Aura\Input\FilterInterface as below.

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<?php
namespace Domicile\Example;

use Aura\Filter\RuleCollection;
use Aura\Input\FilterInterface;

class Filter extends RuleCollection implements FilterInterface
{
}

Let us create the form class.

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<?php
namespace Domicile\Example;

use Aura\Input\Form;

class ContactForm extends Form
{
    public function init()
    {
        $this->setField('name')
            ->setAttribs([
                'id' => 'name',
                'size' => 20,
                'maxlength' => 20,
            ]);
        $this->setField('email')
            ->setAttribs([
                'size' => 20,
                'maxlength' => 20,
            ]);
        $this->setField('url')
            ->setAttribs([
                'size' => 20,
                'maxlength' => 20,
            ]);
        $this->setField('message', 'textarea')
            ->setAttribs([
                'cols' => 40,
                'rows' => 5,
            ]);
        $this->setField('submit', 'submit')
            ->setAttribs(['value' => 'send']);

        $filter = $this->getFilter();

        $filter->addSoftRule('name', $filter::IS, 'string');
        $filter->addSoftRule('name', $filter::IS, 'strlenMin', 4);
        $filter->addSoftRule('email', $filter::IS, 'email');
        $filter->addSoftRule('url', $filter::IS, 'url');
        $filter->addSoftRule('message', $filter::IS, 'string');
        $filter->addSoftRule('message', $filter::IS, 'strlenMin', 6);
    }
}

Create the filter object and pass it on instantiation of form.

Please note that the $rootpath in this example is just above the vendor folder of the composer.

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$filter = new Domicile\Example\Filter(
    new RuleLocator(array_merge(
        require $rootpath . '/vendor/aura/filter/scripts/registry.php',
        ['any' => function () {
            $rule = new \Aura\Filter\Rule\Any;
            $rule->setRuleLocator(new RuleLocator(
                require $rootpath . '/vendor/aura/filter/scripts/registry.php'
            ));
            return $rule;
        }]
    )),
    new Translator(require $rootpath . '/vendor/aura/filter/intl/en_US.php')
);

$form = new Domicile\Example\ContactForm(new Builder, $filter);

The Aura.Input has two methods we can make use.

1 ) fill() method helps us to fill the data values

2 ) filter() method which helps to filter and validate data according to the rules specified in the form.

The code will looks like

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if ($_POST && $_POST['submit'] == 'send') {
    $data = $_POST;
    $form->fill($data);
    if ($form->filter()) {
        //
        echo "Yes successfully validated and filtered";
        var_dump($data);
        exit;
    }
}

The form element gives you hints for the view. An example from the above

Hints for the view

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// get the hints for the name field
$hints = $form->get('name');

// the hints array looks like this:
$hints = array (
  'type' => 'text',
  'name' => 'name',
  'attribs' =>
  array (
    'id' => 'name',
    'type' => NULL,
    'name' => NULL,
    'size' => 20,
    'maxlength' => 20,
  ),
  'options' =>
  array (
  ),
  'value' => NULL,
)

Without using Aura.View completely

If you are not planning to use Aura.View entirely as templating, you can make use of Aura.View helpers which can render to make the form.

For that you need to instantiate Aura\View\HelperLocator and get the field object as below.

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$helper = new Aura\View\HelperLocator([
    'field'         => function () {
        return new Aura\View\Helper\Form\Field(
            require dirname(__DIR__) . '/vendor/aura/view/scripts/field_registry.php'
        );
    },
    'input'         => function () { return new Aura\View\Helper\Form\Input(
            require dirname(__DIR__) . '/vendor/aura/view/scripts/input_registry.php'
        );
    },
    'radios'        => function () { return new Aura\View\Helper\Form\Radios(new Aura\View\Helper\Form\Input\Checked); },
    'repeat'         => function () { return new Aura\View\Helper\Form\Repeat(
            require dirname(__DIR__) . '/vendor/aura/view/scripts/repeat_registry.php'
        );
    },
    'select'        => function () { return new Aura\View\Helper\Form\Select; },
    'textarea'      => function () { return new Aura\View\Helper\Form\Textarea; },
]);

$field = $helper->get('field');
echo $field($form->get('name'));
echo $field($form->get('message'));

// echo $field($form->get('form-element'));

The above will output something like

<input id="name" type="text" name="name" size="20" maxlength="20" />

Using Aura.View

But you can use Aura.View to render it nicely. An example is

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<?php
    echo $this->field($this->form->get('name'));
?>

You can still look more closely on the templates to see how it is used in the example.

If you have any problems or confusions, let me know by comments. I will try to address the same.

I would like to express huge Thanks to Paul M Jones for spending his valuable time on the project, giving valuable feedback on the implementations.

Happy PhPing!

Posted by Hari K T auraphp, filter, form

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