[ZPT] DRAMA: Can Formulator Play Nicely With ZPT? (Part II)

[beno]

At 05:58 PM 10/11/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>First - not the best attitude to have when seeking help.

I did not mean to offend. I just realized that, because one person 
responded to my first post (with irrelevant information), that most other 
zopistas would ignore my post. I've found in these circumstances that being 
*the squeaky wheel* gets results. You're proof :)

>Second - you would probably have gotten an answer faster on the 
>zope@zope.org list.  There are more people there, and more Formulator 
>users.  ZPT is a fairly focused mailing list.  There's even a dedicated 
>Formulator mailing list which will probably be of better help, which you 
>can find on the Formulator page on Zope.org
>
>http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/Formulator

I forgot about this. Thank you.


>On Friday, October 11, 2002, at 04:20  PM, beno wrote:
>
>>Hi;
>>This is my SECOND POST concerning this question. I KNOW someone out there 
>>has the answer. Hopefully that person will be kind enough to help...
>>
>>I'm trying to follow a recipe someone named *macquyver007* posted on 
>>zopelabs for using Formulator. (I've done away with his check_form script 
>>since I'm not interested in authenticating users.) Here's a code snippet:
>>
>><form name="email_us_formulator" method="post" action="email_us.zpt">
>>Your Name:<br>
>><input tal:condition="python:request.has_key('field_Your Name')" 
>>tal:attributes="value request/field_Your Name" name="field_Your Name" 
>>type="text" id="field_Your Name">
>>         <input tal:condition="python:not request.has_key('field_Your 
>> Name')" name="field_Your Name" type="text" id="field_Your Name">
>
>Alright.  Here's what I do with table based forms that I don't let 
>formulator automatically render.  I use a table based form so I can (a) 
>control layout, and (b) have some nice contexts.  If your id's have spaces 
>in them - you're probably going to have problems.
>
>1.<table tal:define="form here/myFormulatorForm">
>2.  <tr tal:define="yourname 
>request/YourName|some_other_data_source/YourName|nothing">
>3.   <th align="left">Your Name:</th>
>4.   <td><input type="text" name="YourName"
>5.              tal:replace="structure python:form.YourName.render(yourname)">
>6.   </td>
>7. </tr>
>8.</table>
>
>On line 1, I make a handy shortcut that I can use in expressions inside of 
>the table tag.
>
>On line 2, I look for a value to populate the field with, looking first in 
>the 'request' object (usually populated when doing error handling, 
>depending on the method used), and then some other data source like a SQL 
>record or another object, if this form is being used to edit items, 
>finally setting the value to 'nothing' if those paths fail.
>
>On line 4, I make the input tag.  But it could just be a span, could be 
>any tag really, because I'm going to replace it.  I often sketch out my 
>forms in GoLive first before adding the TAL annotations, and it's helpful 
>to keep a tag that approximates the output.
>
>Because on line 5, I do a tal:replace structure statement, calling the 
>render method on the Field 'YourName' which is in the 'myFormulatorForm' 
>object.  This lets me use Formulator to decide details about each field - 
>its size, max length, and other validation and enforcement settings, and 
>have those get rendered properly at output time AND dealt with properly at 
>validation time.
>
>Using the code above, I don't have to have two versions of the same tag - 
>one that responds to whether the request has the value, and one that 
>doesn't.  Formulator will populate the field value with what I pass in to 
>the 'render' tag, and will handle an empty value fine.

This worked nicely.


>>My problems are these:
>>Why doesn't the form validate? How do I make it validate?
>
>If Formulator has the right information (depending on how you either 
>populate your input tags, or generate them - which is why I use 
>'tal:replace="structure ..."' - it helps ensure that Formulators 
>validators get what they want), you can have a Python Script like the 
>following:
>
>from Products.Formulator.Errors import FormValidationError
>request = container.REQUEST
>errors = []
>try: context.myFormulatorForm.validate_all_to_request(request)
>except FormValidationError, e:
>     errors = e.errors
>
>## You can go through the errors list and build a structure
>## like a dictionary to make hilighting error fields easier,
>## or you can just loop through the errors in the return
>## page to display error fields and the validation messages
>## in a single block.
>edict = {}
>for error in errors:
>     edict[error.field_id] = error.error_text
>
>if errors:
>     return context.restrictedTraverse('mytemplate.pt')(
>         request, errors=errors, edict=edict,
>         )
>else:
>     ## do success handler

Nice script. However, I recall that Formulator has it's own built-in 
checking, for things like email syntax, etc., and none of this seems to 
work properly. Any suggestions? Also, I presume we *still* have to send to 
a DTML script in order to invoke <dtml-sendmail>. Am I correct, or do you 
have a ZPT work-around for this?


>>How do I incorporate a textarea? I've tried changing the *input* part of 
>>the tag, but that simply makes the tag disappear!
>
>There are a couple of different TextArea Formulator Fields.
><input tal:replace="structure python:form.aTextArea.render(value)">
>and
><textarea tal:replace="structure python:form.aTextArea.render(value)">
></textarea>

Worked nicely :)

Thank you!
beno