This is a huge downfall. It's creating a usability issue with my form. I can extend it; however, this should be a default feature. Is it too late to be added to 1.6? Perhaps for 1.6.1?

Just like to point out that I found two work-arounds for this. The first is the easiest and that is if you are retrieving valid items from a database, then whenever you iterate through to create the optgroup items, add the valid values to a new array and pass it in as a parameter to the InArray validator.

The other option is to override the InArray validator and add another method. I called it calculateValids() and here is it's construct:

class My_Validators_InArray extends Zend_Validate_Abstract
{
    CONST NOT_IN_ARRAY = 'notInArray';
    
    protected $_messageTemplates = array(
        self::NOT_IN_ARRAY => '\'%value%\' was not found in the haystack',
    );
    
    protected $_haystack;
    
    protected $_strict;
    
    public function __construct(array $haystack, $strict=false)
    {
        $this->setHaystack($haystack)
            ->setStrict($strict);
    }
    
    public function calculateValids($array)
    {
        $valids = array();
        foreach($array as $key=>$value)
        {
            if(is_array($value))
                $valids = array_merge($valids, $this->calculateValids($value));
            else
                $valids[] = $key;
        }
        return $valids;
    }
    
    public function getHaystack()
    {
        return $this->_haystack;
    }
    
    public function setHaystack(array $haystack)
    {
        $this->_haystack = $this->calculateValids($haystack);
        
        return $this;
    }
    
    public function getStrict()
    {
        return $this->_strict;
    }
    
    public function setStrict($strict)
    {
        $this->_strict = $strict;
        return $this;
    }
    
    public function isValid($value)
    {
        $this->_setValue($value);
        if(!in_array($value, $this->_haystack, $this->_strict))
        {
            $this->_error();
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    }
}

Not the prettiest; however, it works :) Hopefully this can make it in to the next release or minor release.

I looked into the code of Zend_Form_Element_Multi, because I wanted to implement my own isValid method on a province select element. To my surprise, I found that validation of optgroups is supported. It works very well. The problem in my case was that I add added the multioptions in the render method, which is far to late for the validator to work (the validator will have no options at its disposal at all!).

After I implemented the getMultiOptions method to return a fixed set of provinces, validation worked just fine. So I wonder if this issue should not be marked as resolved?

Under code review since 27.06.2009 (Incubator r16316)

Feature implemented with ZF1.10. See option 'recursive'.