Using Custom Form Elements With the Annotation Builder in Zend Framework 2

WARNING: This post was written a long time ago. It exists here as a record and may not reflect my current views or opinions. Also, any code, technologies or examples may be out of date.

Just a quick little tip:

Since ZF 2.2, we now have the FormElementManager service available. This makes it nice as easy to register new, custom form elements and fieldsets in your ZF2 application (see Creating Custom Elements). However, I quickly discovered that it wasn’t possible to use custom elements easily in my forms if the form was created using the annotation builder.

According to the ZF2 manual the annotation builder is used like so:

<?php

use Zend\Form\Annotation\AnnotationBuilder;

$builder = new AnnotationBuilder();
$form = $builder->createForm('User');

The problem here is that the AnnotationBuilder instance has no knowledge of the FormElementManager to find the custom elements. It has no FormFactory set so it creates it’s own internal instance, which isn’t aware of the FormElementManager.

The solution I have found to this, is to set the FormFactory of the AnnotationBuilder like so:

<?php

use Zend\Form\Annotation\AnnotationBuilder;
use Zend\Form\Factory;

$serviceManager = /* Get application service manager */;

$builder = new AnnotationBuilder();

$annotationBuilder->setFormFactory(
    new Factory($serviceManager->get('FormElementManager'))
);     

$form = $builder->createForm('User');

Now if the User class is annotated with custom form elements, it will all work nicely.

That’s my solution, let me know if you have a better one.