Populate a zend multiselect box while editing form

Question

i have a multiselect box (of interests) in my zend form, and i am selecting multiple options from it while i am adding a user.

Now when i am editing this user, i need to set some options selected by default, (which i selected while adding the user).

How can i achieve this? I used populate(Array) in my controller's update action, but that does not work.

This is the code of multi select box in the user add/edit form:

$interests = new Zend_Form_Element_Multiselect('interest');
$days->setLabel('Interests')
->addMultiOptions($user_interests)
->setRequired(true)
->addValidator('NotEmpty');

And while adding the "interest" options in the form, $user_interests array is:

array(1=>'Blogging', 2=>'Swimming', 3=>'Cricket', 4=>'Yoga')

I have selected the first 2 interests while adding the user.

Now while editing, i get the user data from a database query. This data array is used to populate the form, and this array structure is like this:

Array ( 
[username] => john 
[user_dob] => 1981-03-12 
[email] => [email protected] 
[interest] => Array ( [0] => 1 [1] => 2 ) 
)

and as you can see, the interests "Blogging" and "Swimming" are supposed to be selected in my edit form. But i see that only the "Swimming" option is getting selected.

Answer 1

$interest_data = $users->getUserInterests($id);

 foreach($interest_data as $r)
 {
   $interests[$r['interest_id']] = $r['interest'];
 }

 $this->view->interests_selected = $interests;

After this we can have like this in the controller

$form->interest_id->setValue($interests);

Hope this helps someone

Answer 2

Best way to test in this situation is to submit the form with elements selected, dump the $form->getValues() array and compare it to what you're trying to populate. If it's the same, then you may have other mistake in your code.

Answer 3

Well, I could achieve a solution with the help of jquery and javascript.

First in my controller, i queried the database and got all the interests of the editing user id. Then i assigned this array to the corresponding view:

$interest_data = $users->getUserInterests($id);

foreach($interest_data as $r)
{
 $interests[$r['interest_id']] = $r['interest'];
}

$this->view->interests_selected = $interests;

Now in the view, at the top of the file, inside jquery's document ready function, i converted the assigned php array into a javascript array and then looped through this array to mark the selected options from all the options:

<script>
$(document).ready(function() {

<?php
// array of assigned interests to user
$arr = $this->interests_selected;
?>

// convert from php to js array
var jsArray = ["<?php echo join("\", \"", $arr); ?>"];

var optionsToSelect = jsArray;
var select = document.getElementById( 'interest_id' ); // interests dropdown

// loop through all the select box options and mark those in the jsArray as selected

for ( var i = 0, l = select.options.length, o; i < l; i++ )
{
  o = select.options[i];
  if ( optionsToSelect.indexOf( o.text ) != -1 )
  {
    o.selected = true;
  }
}

});
</script>