Jani Hartikainen has a new post that should interest the Zend Framework developers out there - a look at automatically querying the database to fill in the right option values for a Zend_Form element.

It's not very tricky to query a database, and fill a Zend_Form element's possible values from the resultset, but it can be quite boring and extraneous code... We could also create an element which we can give some SQL, and it'll fill itself automatically! This way you can even define database-backed elements in XML or INI configuration files.

He starts with a simple Select element type example and builds from there. He creates a DbSelect layer for the element and with the help of a main method, _performSelect, the script can create a new instance of the CU_Form_Element_DbSelect to pull in the options from the SQL (given in the "dbSelect" parameter).