Let's build a simple login form. It will need elements representing:
username
password
submit
For our purposes, let's assume that a valid username should be alphanumeric characters only, start with a letter, have a minimum length of 6, and maximum length of 20; they will be normalized to lowercase. Passwords must be a minimum of 6 characters. We'll simply toss the submit value when done, so it can remain unvalidated.
We'll use the power of Zend_Form's configuration
options to build the form:
<?php
$form = new Zend_Form();
$form->setAction('/user/login')
->setMethod('post');
// Create and configure username element:
$username = $form->createElement('text', 'username');
$username->addValidator('alnum')
->addValidator('regex', false, array('/^[a-z]+/'))
->addValidator('stringLength', false, array(6, 20))
->setRequired(true)
->addFilter('StringToLower');
// Create and configure password element:
$password = $form->createElement('password', 'password');
$password->addValidator('StringLength', false, array(6))
->setRequired(true);
// Add elements to form:
$form->addElement($username)
->addElement($password)
// use addElement() as a factory to create 'Login' button:
->addElement('submit', 'login', array('label' => 'Login'));
Next, we'll create a controller for handling this:
<?php
class UserController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
public function getForm()
{
// create form as above
return $form;
}
public function indexAction()
{
// render user/form.phtml
$this->view->form = $this->getForm();
$this->render('form');
}
public function loginAction()
{
if (!$this->getRequest()->isPost()) {
return $this->_forward('index');
}
$form = $this->getForm();
if (!$form->isValid($_POST)) {
// Failed validation; redisplay form
$this->view->form = $form;
return $this->render('form');
}
$values = $form->getValues();
// now try and authenticate....
}
}
And a view script for displaying the form:
<h2>Please login:</h2>
<?php echo $this->form ?>
As you'll note from the controller code, there's more work to do:
while the submission may be valid, you may still need to do some authentication
using Zend_Auth or another authorization mechanism.