Smarty

[katana]

A few month ago, i had sent a message on the mailing list about a sort of "forms framework" i had written to work with Smarty. It has been developped a little since then, used by 2 or 3 developers, and I think I can offer it here again.

The website is not back yet since my personal server had some problems and is still sleeping under the desk... if it's requested I'll setup a website again.

First, my app. has bugs, missing features, no or not enough documentation. If you can do with it, you can read further on

Formsess is a set of plugins, prefilters and php classes / functions used to handle forms and forms data across pages when using smarty.
A set of custom XHTML tags, very similar to HTML Form tags, let you create forms in your templates. The data from each form is then handled by a class that will be used to store the data in a session dataspace, validate the data, and so on.
In fact, you can write all your forms without caring about the "value" "selected" or "checked" part, all of that is handled in the PHP script.

You can download the files needed by formsess here:
http://www.katana-inc.com/formsess/formsess.zip

There is no README nor INSTALL files, i've gotta create them (in fact a lot of work was done but my CVS repository was LOST).
Anyway, the setup is not complex: keep the libs directory as is, but you can rename it (a little like smarty's libs dir). The Smarty_fs file contains the definition of a class that extends smarty and is used to automatically include formsess' files. It's not mandatory but of course it's cleaner that way.
The prepend file creates the Smarty_fs object and assigns 2 paths.
And finally, the config.inc.php file is included by prepend.php and contains 2 config vars.
This is my own file setup, you can change it to whatever you want, as long as the logic is the same, formsess will just work the same way.

I have written a quick sample script / template. It has not beed tested, sorry, i'll fix that later.
You can find the sample files in the archive in /samples/. It just displays a basic form with several elements, and when data is submited, it saves the values then redirects to the form.

Ask here if you need help, I'll answer as soon as possible.
If you find bugs I'll be glad to fix them.
And if you have suggestions, I'll listen.

Hope it helps.

Edit:
An anonymous CVS is now available:
CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.phpedit.net:/cvs/formsess
no password
I'm not sure what I'm doing is interesting but I'll keep on working on it

[dak]

Can you translate all comments in all files from french to english. For exmaple in files: Smarty_fs.class.php and formsess.class.php and may be in another files?

[katana]

Huhu sorry; yes, of course. I've developed the application itself in english so that it can be easily distributed, but these files were originally written for another project.

I'm currently working on setting up a CVS for the project, it should be up with an anonymous acces on monday.

And I'll update the zip file with "translated" files.

[ronan]

I have not looked at your project for the moment. I guess you know that there are already some scripts which offer the same features:
- html forms generation and validation written by Manuel Lemos http://www.phpclasses.org/browse.html/package/1.html
- smarty forms http://freshmeat.net/projects/smartyform/

Can you explain what are the differences between your project and these ?

Regards,

Ronan

[katana]

In fact i first developped a simple form validation class, then extended it to store the data between pages then added the direct interaction between the templates and the data. So it was written for me, and now that it looks usable i just want to share it.

Now for the two scripts you talk about: i didn't write this to make something better than the other scripts. I wanted something that allowed good interaction with smarty. What I can say about formsess is that it makes the work for templates designer very easy, without having to learn any (or very few) tags, since the tags used by formsess are almost identical to classical HTML tags. I think that the main difference is a philosophical one

[muppie]

I developed my Form class... and thought about making it a smarty plugin.... however I ended up with something like this:

$smarty->assign('form', $form->build());

and in the template:

[muppie]

[jorgerpo]

Your approach seems great muppie. Would you like to share it?

[katana]

Sorry, for some reason I didn't get an email for your reply.

The "official" website for formsess is http://www.katana-inc.com/formsess/

It is still missing a solid documentation, but there is one already. Don't hesitate to ask if you have any question.

[katana]

In order to keep the post up to date, I'll add a new version was released (2.0.0 RC2) and a real documentation is now available on the website (http://www.katana-inc.com/formsess)

Several nice features are being added, like dynCalendar integration (DHTML calendar from phpguru.org which allows quick & easy selection of a date for a html_select_date field)

[muppie]

[Justin]

I spent all day with formsess and smarty.. and what can I say.. it's great!
waiting for new formsess versions and features
_________________
http://www.baubas.net

[katana]

Whoa, thanks a lot justin. That's the kind of reply that gives you the will to develop

Can I use your post as a testimony on the site ?

[Justin]

[katana]

I usually use Smarty configuration files for multilanguage, so using:
<fs:validate field="fieldname" check="empty" message="{#errormessage_fieldname_empty#}" />
would work.

However, there is something I need to fix with quotes escaping at the moment, so you'd better avoid single quotes inside the messages