In a recent post to his blog Chris Hartjes has written about his (mis)adventures with Zend_Form, a powerful but sometimes difficult to use component of the Zend Framework.

Zend_Form is a super-powerful, force-of-nature tool. By force-of-nature I mean it does all this crazy stuff, and you can see it doing it, but I am not alone in admitting that taming it sometimes is very difficult. When building tools to make form programatically you either severely limit peoples options or make it so flexible that there are multiple ways to get something done.

Because the Zend Framework "treats you like an adult" it can be difficult to get just what you want from it (ease of use isn't quite top of the list). In this case, Chris wanted a relatively simple form that did some checking before it successfully submitted. Over and over the form passed without him being able to tell why - the solution was a pretty simple one, though - be sure to create all form elements before you do validation.

He includes some same code - a "before" and "after" for the solution.