Adding Widget form fields dynamically

I am trying to add form field to a WordPress widget dynamically. So if the user want to add another date to an event they can click a button to get more fields.

The question is: How do save newly created input fields to my database?
Do i need to write a custom update function? Any tips?

This is how the widget looks:

This is my php code for the widget (so far):

    class Spillelister extends WP_Widget {

    public function Spillelister() {

        $widget_options = array (
            'classname' => 'spillelister-widget',
            'description' => 'Widget for å illustrere spillelister.');

        parent::WP_Widget('spillelister_widget', 'Spilleplan', $widget_options);
    }

    // The actual widget user interface
    public function widget($args, $instance) {

        extract( $args, EXTR_SKIP);
        $title = ( $instance['title'] ) ? $instance['title'] : 'Spilleplan';
        $body = ( $instance['body'] ) ? $instance['body'] : 'Ingen flere forestillinger';

        ?>

            <?php echo $before_widget; ?>
            <?php echo $before_title . $title . $after_title; ?>
            <p><?php echo $body; ?></p>

        <?php
    }

    public function update() {

    }

    public function form() {
    ?>
        <div class="date_stamp">
        <p>
            <label>Dato</label> <input type="text" class="datepicker">
            <br>
            <label>Tid</label> <input type="text">
            <span class="remove">Remove</span>
        </p>
        </div>
        <p>
            <span class="add">Add fields</span>
        </p>

    <?php 
    }


}

function spillelister_init() {
    register_widget('Spillelister');    
}
add_action('widgets_init', 'Spillelister_init');

Any tips, hints or answers are appreciated. 🙂

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

Interesting Question!
I’ve never seen repeatable fields used in Widgets. Giving a full Answer would require too much work/time, so I’ll give you links to the resources I know, and hopefully you’ll make this work and share the solution with us 😉

All this examples deal with Meta Boxes, you’ll need to copy the jQuery scripts and adapt the post_meta to the Widgets case.

• Create more Meta Boxes as needed – WPSE Q&A
• Repeatable Custom Fields in a Metabox – Gist

  /**
   * Repeatable Custom Fields in a Metabox
   * Author: Helen Hou-Sandi
   *
   * From a bespoke system, so currently not modular - will fix soon
   * Note that this particular metadata is saved as one multidimensional array (serialized)
   */

• Repeatable Custom Fields in a Metabox – Another Gist example, no description given. This one is quite interesting as it has the code to sort the fields.

Method 2

This is an example of a dynamic widget that renders two fields (image-id and url). if you enter an image-id and press “update”, two new fields are added. I build it to create a slick slilder with images and linked url’s.

<?php

class imp_image_slider extends WP_Widget
{
/**
 * imp_image_slider constructor.
 */
public function __construct()
{
    parent::__construct(false, $name = "Impulse Image Slider", array("description" => "Creates Slick Image Slider"));
}

/**
 * @see WP_Widget::widget
 *
 * @param array $args
 * @param array $instance
 */
public function widget($args, $instance)
{
// render widget in frontend
}


/**
 * @see WP_Widget::update
 *
 * @param array $newInstance
 * @param array $oldInstance
 *
 * @return array
 */
public function update($newInstance, $oldInstance)
{
    $instance = $oldInstance;
    $instance['images'] = array();
    $instance['urls'] = array();
    if (isset($newInstance['images'])) {
        foreach ($newInstance['images'] as $key => $value) {
            if (!empty(trim($value))) {
                $instance['images'][$key] = $value;
                $instance['urls'][$key] = $newInstance['urls'][$key];
            }
        }
    }

    return $instance;
}

/**
 * @see WP_Widget::form
 *
 * @param array $instance
 */
public function form($instance)
{
    $images = isset($instance['images']) ? $instance['images'] : array();
    $urls = isset($instance['urls']) ? $instance['urls'] : array();
    $images[] = '';
    $form = '';

    foreach ($images as $idx => $value) {
        $image = isset($images[$idx]) ? $images[$idx] : '';
        $url = isset($urls[$idx]) ? $urls[$idx] : '';
        $form .= '<p>'
            . '<label>Slides:</label>'
            . sprintf(
                '<input type="text" name="%1$s[%2$s]" value="%3$s" class="widefat" placeholder="Image ID">',
                $this->get_field_name('images'),
                $idx,
                esc_attr($image))
            . '</p>'
            . '<p>'
            . sprintf(
                '<input type="text" name="%1$s[%2$s]" value="%3$s" class="widefat" placeholder="Url">',
                $this->get_field_name('urls'),
                $idx,
                esc_attr($url))
            . '</p>';
    }

    echo $form;
}
}

add_action('widgets_init', create_function('', 'return register_widget("imp_image_slider");'));

?>

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0