Form object as a child of control

[vmakre]

When i put var_dump of some control object I can see Form object as children with all other controls as childrens. Can I get some explanation of this ? . It is hard to debug when you see a lot of garbage in objects.

[spekary]

All controls have a reference to their top level parent form object as a convenience. That is all. It is redundant, since there is a global $_FORM, AND you can get to the form by moving up the parent control chain.

The form object itself has a list of all the controls, so this does create a circular reference unfortunately. I had to put some code in to prevent that from causing problems during form serialization.

Perhaps we should change this? Having this extra reference is just a convenience. Changing this may slow something down, since we will need some extra dereferences to get to the form object. But form structures usually are not very deep, so it is probably not a big deal to change it.