Form validation

Manual form validation

Form data should be sent with Outlast Framework’s $('#formid').$ofw().submit() method. This will allow you to send the request to a controller where you can manually validate the data and provide a proper response.

Go see the documentation on how to send form data via ajax requests and provide proper responses.

In short, you can validate the form data using your own custom code and then return something like this:

Automatic form validation

You can validate form fields based on their built-in validation methods (see below on defining how validation methods are defined for each field type).

For now, you must specify the error messages because default error messages are not provided by OFW.

Handling errors on the client side

All you need to do on the client side is to use the standard ajax request methods of the OFW Javascript API and use Bootstrap.

If you are using a callback function to handle the response you’ll need to manually call ofw.validate():

If a status error is returned, the following will happen automatically:

• if you returned the message property, a zaj.alert() will pop up
• if you returned the highlight property, all fields with errors will receive the .has-error Bootstrap class
• if you returned the errors property, the fields will receive the .has-error Bootstrap class and a standard Bootstrap tooltop will be popped up displaying the error message
• when .has-error is added, it will check to see if the input is in a form-group and will add the class to the form-group parent as well
• if you used a callback function as the second parameter of your ajax request, the json data will simply be returned (as a string) and no automatic actions will be performed

Defining validation methods

Validation methods are set in each field-type’s field definition class. Open up the file /system/plugins/_jquery/fields/email.field.php and take note of the class’s validation method:

If the validate() method of a field definition class returns true for the given value then the value will be considered valid. If false is returned, then it will be considered invalid.

This is designed to be simple. If you need more control than simply stating valid or invalid, you can always create additional manual form validations and return more specific error messages.

Defining the default error message

[todo: implement this!]

Until this is implemented, always use the 3rd parameter of $this->zajlib->form->validate() to specify your own error message.