PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

Creating a generic form element generator

It's pretty easy to create a function that simply outputs a form input tag such as <input type="text" name="whatever" >. In order to make a form generator generically useful, however, we need to think about the bigger picture. Here are some other considerations over and above the basic input tag:

• The form input tag and its associated HTML attributes
• A label that tells the user what information they are entering
• The ability to display entry errors following validation (more on that later!)
• Some sort of wrapper, such as a <div> tag, or an HTML table <td> tag

How to do it...

1. First, we define a Application\Form\Generic class. This will also later serve as a base class for specialized form elements:

   namespace Application\Form; ...