Unifying client- and server-side validation

[alexweissman]

Just a sneak preview of what I'm up to.

The goal is to create a unified way of representing form validation rules for both client- and server-side validation. The idea is to have a single JSON file for each form, called a schema. A schema simply maps each field to the validation rules for that field. For example:

{
    "user_name" : {
        "validators" : {
            "length" : {
                "min" : 1,
                "max" : 50,
                "message" : "'Username' must be between 1 and 50 characters long."
            },
            "required" : {
                "message" : "'Username' is required."
            }
        }
    },
    "display_name" : {
        "validators" : {
            "length" : {
                "min" : 1,
                "max" : 50,
                "message" : "'Display name' must be between 1 and 50 characters long."
            },
            "required" : {
                "message" : "'Display name' is required."
            }
        }
    },
    ...   

I've written a class called ValidationSchema that can load this file, and generate the client- and server-side rules.

For the client-side rules, we'll be using bootstrapvalidator. The nice thing about this plugin is that you can specify all the rules in data-* attributes, so we can generate everything in FormBuilder.

For server-side rules, we'll continue with the valitron library. It doesn't have as active of a community as I'd like, but it is lightweight and can validate collections of fields (i.e. forms) as opposed to just individual variables.

I've already added the client-side functionality to bootsole; you can check it out here:
https://github.com/alexweissman/bootsole#validation-schema-and-validation-rules

I'll try to have server-side functionality, along with some documentation for the schema, up in the next few days. This should dramatically simplify our validation layer going forward.

[alexweissman]

This is all handled now by Fortress.