Forms

You're probably looking for decorators. All forms and form elements in Zend_Form use decorators to render their output.

This can easily be done using decorators. For instance using the Description decorator. It is important to note though that you will need to turn off escaping for the output of the decorator:

Now, you can use the following to add extra HTML to the element:

The file element needs a special file decorator, which is added by default. When you set your own decorators for file elements, you delete the default decorators. For example:

You should use a File decorator instead of the ViewHelper for the file element, like so:

The receive() method will return true for file elements that are not required. The reason is that you said "the file can be omitted, and that's ok for me". The receive() method will return false only in the event of a failure.

Still there are several ways to detect if a file has been uploaded or not:

• Use isUploaded which returns a boolean
• Use getFileName which returns null in this case (note that you must use the latest release for this behaviour)
• Use getFileInfo which will have an empty 'file' key and the flag 'isUploaded' set to false