Rob Allen's DevNotes

Now that Zend Framework 1.7 has been released, I thought I'd take a look at the built in file upload element, Zend_Form_Element_File, and see how it can be used. This is how to use it in its most basic form.

I decided to use the same set of form elements as before in order to make things easy.

Let's start with the form:

The form

We extend Zend_Form and store it in the application/forms folder and so the class name is forms_UploadForm:

<?php

class forms_UploadForm extends Zend_Form
{
    public function __construct($options = null)
    {
        parent::__construct($options);
        $this->setName('upload');
        $this->setAttrib('enctype', 'multipart/form-data');

        $description = new Zend_Form_Element_Text('description');
        $description->setLabel('Description')
                  ->setRequired(true)
                  ->addValidator('NotEmpty');

        $file = new Zend_Form_Element_File('file');
        $file->setLabel('File')
            ->setDestination(BASE_PATH . '/data/uploads')
            ->setRequired(true);

        $submit = new Zend_Form_Element_Submit('submit');
        $submit->setLabel('Upload');

        $this->addElements(array($description, $file, $submit));

    }
}

Note that BASE_PATH is not automatically defined within Zend Framework, so you would have define it yourself within your bootstrap.

As before, we set the name and enctype attribute of the form to allow for files to be uploaded. The form itself has two fields: a text field called 'description' and the file upload field called 'file', along with a submit button. Nothing especially complicated here.

The Zend_Form_Element_File element has a setDestination() method which is used to tell the underlying Zend_File_Transfer_Adapter_Http where we want the file that is uploaded to be stored. In this case we choose data/uploads.

The controller & view

The controller is also very standard:

<?php

class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action 
{
    public function indexAction() 
    {
        $this->view->headTitle('Home');
        $this->view->title = 'Zend_Form_Element_File Example';
        $this->view->bodyCopy = "<p>Please fill out this form.</p>";

        $form = new forms_UploadForm();

        if ($this->_request->isPost()) {
            $formData = $this->_request->getPost();
            if ($form->isValid($formData)) {

                // success - do something with the uploaded file
                $uploadedData = $form->getValues();
                $fullFilePath = $form->file->getFileName();

                Zend_Debug::dump($uploadedData, '$uploadedData');
                Zend_Debug::dump($fullFilePath, '$fullFilePath');

                echo "done";
                exit;

            } else {
                $form->populate($formData);
            }
        }

        $this->view->form = $form;

    }
}

The view, views/scripts/index.phtml, is trivial:

<h1><?= $this->title; ?></h1>
<?= $this->bodyCopy; ?>
<?= $this->form; ?>

If the form validates correctly, the $uploadedData array will contain the values of the form fields along with the filename of the file that was uploaded. Note that this filename is not fully qualified, so if you need the entire path to the file, then use the getFileName() method on the file element.

Conclusion

That's all there is to it for simple uploading of forms. There are still a few fairly important bugs in the component that we'll have to wait for 1.7.2 for. Specifically the Count validator doesn't always work as you'd expect and don't use getValues() and receive() as it isn't yet clever enough to know not to call move_uploaded_file() more than once.

As usual, here's a zip file of the project I created to test this: Zend_Form_Element_File_Example.zip (including Zend Framework (a snapshot of the release-1.7 branch) which is why it's 3.9MB large).

This entry was posted on Saturday, 29th November 2008 at 18:41 and is filed under Zend Framework.