In this small tutorial, we'll try to build an Ext form that will submit in the tradional way, like all regular html forms
Introduction
As a programmer, you may know PHP (or ASP, or any other server-side language) and the tradional way of working with user-interfaces. You build forms in your server-side language, and output them in plain-text html to the end-user. You may use a templating engine, but in the end, you're sending nicely formatted html to the end-user.
With Ext, it's really easy to build nice-looking forms and interfaces, so you'd like to use that. But you also have a lot of code that already works, which you'd rather keep than converting all of it to handle JSON-formatted data etc.
At least, that was and is my current situation.
Getting Started: the HTML page
You've most probably already read how to include all required Ext-code in your page, but let me repeat that for you: (place this in the head-section of your html doc)
<title>A tradional form</title> <!-- Include Ext and app-specific scripts: --> <script type="text/javascript" src="ext/adapter/ext/ext-base.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="ext/ext-all-debug.js"></script> <!-- Include your own Javascript file here - adapt the filename to your filename--> <script type="text/javascript" src="ext/mytestscript.js"></script> <!-- Include Ext stylesheets here: --> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ext/resources/css/ext-all.css">
Next to that, your page certainly needs a place where we'll render the form. (put this in the body of your page)
<div id="mytradionalform"></div>
That's it, for you html code. You can put this in a regular html file (e.g. form.html), or you can output it via a server-side script. Doesn't matter.
The Javascript code
Next, we'll build the Javascript code. Best practice seems to be to put this in a separate file. I've called it "mytestscript.js" (see html above). Doesn't matter how you call it, just make sure to reference the correct file.
See the code below.
Ext.onReady(function(){ var simple = new Ext.form.FormPanel({ standardSubmit: true, frame:true, title: 'Register', 350, defaults: { 230}, defaultType: 'textfield', items: [{ fieldLabel: 'Username', name: 'username', allowBlank:false }, { inputType: 'hidden', id: 'submitbutton', name: 'myhiddenbutton', value: 'hiddenvalue' } ], buttons: [{ text: 'Submit', handler: function() { simple.getForm().getEl().dom.action = 'test.php'; simple.getForm().getEl().dom.method = 'POST'; simple.getForm().submit(); } }] }); simple.render('mytradionalform'); });
Important part of this script are:
- The "standardSubmit: true" line, which will make sure the form is submitted via the standard way
- The handler for the submit button. At first I thought adding "standardSubmit: true" would be sufficient, but it's not.
- simple.render() says where the form should be places. if you change the id of the <div> tag in your html, don't forget to change this name too