forms best practice

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1

Hello,

I am wondering what is considered best practice when it comes to forms and form validation.

I wrote a date validator that will turn the date into a unix timestamp for further processing, analogue to the numeric validator that will also normalize the value.

Now i use my Model directly for the form as suggested in the documentation.

Problem is: when a user enters an invalid date, the form is of course re-displayed to him, but the original invalid data he entered is lost, so he just gets an empty field instead of his wrong input.

I would like the user to see his original field input again, so he can correct it instead of re-typing it.

How would you do that?

Thanks for your answers,

mh

2

That's because your validator does the conversion even when the user enters an invalid date. You should only do so when the date is valid.

3

I already do that.

I was a bit off-track; the actual problem is how i output the date input field:

<?php echo CHtml::activeTextField($mitarbeiter,'ma_geburtsdatum', array('value'=>

        Yii::app()->dateFormatter->formatDateTime( $mitarbeiter->ma_geburtsdatum, 'medium',null))); ?>

if $mitarbeiter->ma_geburtsdatum is 'abc', formatDateTime will of course try to parse it as a time and output it as a time.

My problem: if the date comes from the database, i want it to run through formatDateTime; if it comes from the user, i don't.

How would you handle that? is there a nice and elegant way?

4

I would avoid setting the 'value' attribute this way. The conversion should only occur when the input is validated. You may call formatDateTime() inside your date validator.

5

if i have a update form, i get the data from the database in a format which i do not want to show to my users without formatting first; the validator does not seem the right place for that.

As I understand it, the validator should turn user input into normalized data if correct and else throw an error; I also need to turn normalized data (from db) into user-suitable formatted output somewhere.

6

Because the DB format is different from user input, I would define a new property using getter/setter to store user input.



private $_dateText;





public function getDateText()


{


    if($this->_dateText===null) // not set before 


         // return the formatted DB value


    else


         return $this->_dateText;


}





public function setDateText($value)


{


     // this is called when user enters data


     $this->_dateText=$value;


}

Then, in beforeSave(), you need to convert _dateText and save it to your DB field.

Your validation should be against 'dateText'. Make sure you also declare 'dateText' in safeAttributes()