Surely I'm reiterating the obvious here, but Javascript alone cannot/should not be relied upon for validation. It does play a useful and important role, however its scope should normally be limited to improving the users experience with supplying input that our system understands. If the framework provides a facility for sending Javascript to the browser, I would propose including a mechanism that allows the developer to specify which browsers their script can safely run in.
Its just a quick observation, but the role of validation within Struts (a web app. framework) should be limited validating user input. This is closely related to the role an ActionForm plays by representing user input as Strings. Therefore, IMHO, the goal of Struts validation should simply be to ensure user supplied input can safely be converted into the objects & primitives our domain objects expect. Within this context, validating user input, regular expressions are very valuable and powerful and should be made available.
As someone else stated earlier, domain specific validations can, and normally do, require more sophisticated mechanisms than regular expressions alone provide. In general, I would not advise that anyone make their domain validations dependant on the validation facilities that Struts or JavaScript provide.
Anyway, that my 2 cents,
Levi Cook
Greenbrier & Russel
Madison, Wisconsin
www.gr.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Richards [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2001 9:04 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: development issues
>But its not bad either for basic form validation (null, range checks & like)
>and much better than using Javascript. I dont think any backend will rely
>upon JSP validation and wont perform its own tests prior to saving the data.
Well, one of the 1.1 discussions is client side validation using JavaScript,
which as of JavaScript1.2 has regext facilties built in, so I'd expect they'd
be used. But that stops older browsers from working. But as you point out,
server side validation should be done as well to correctly check the data
against a greater number of tests.
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