Following part I, here is the final step to code a new symfony form widget in order to improve a many-to-many relationship. After discussing the best UI possible for a many-to-many relationship, we are now going to look how to code it as a symfony widget. I would not pretend it is the best solution, but I believe it is clean enough to be used and it definitively works!
One of the comment point me to the following approach: http://www.ryancramer.com/journal/entries/select_multiple/. It is also an elegant way to do it, unfortunately it does not work for me since my list of available object is extremely long, therefore a select is again not a good approach. Don't get me wrong, my approach is not necessarily the best but it fits a specific user case.
Before starting you can have a look at a demo of what we will get at the end. Here is a video to show the different interactions.
Pre-requisite:
- symfony 1.3/1.4
- jQuery 1.4+ and jQuery UI 1.8+. This might seems overkilling for a simple widget but most of the time you are using these 2 libraries in your project already. In jQuery UI you specifically need for this widget the new autocomplete widget.
Ok, no more talk, let's go to the code! You can find it as a gist at http://gist.github.com/443124. Feel free to clone, improve and share! This code need some refactoring for sure but I did not have time yet and many people where asking for it. Feel free to improve it and share it ;-)
Stay tuned, we will publish some new widgets in the coming months...
