If you insist on front-side validation (which, yes, can make the user experience better), you should ALWAYS have backup/duplicate server-side validation.. otherwise, what happens for the browsers/users who 1) don't have JS enabled, 2) don't have JS functionality ?
As for where the appropriate place is business side.. That's dependent upon your system design. My Actions merely act as a gateway to business objects that handle data validation. If the data isn't right, I aggregate a list of custom exceptions ('UserLoginNameAlreadyExistsException') to be handed back to the Action caller, and return to the caller w/o performing any more business logic. The action caller checks that list for entries, and accumulates form field error messages appropriately, and then forwards/returns (actionmapping) to the entry page.
if the business logic generates no custom exceptions, i perform the business logic as appropriate (ie, updating/creating an entity bean, and return an empty list to the caller.
if i have a system level problem (EJB/JNDI/something systematic that just doesn't work), I throw a custom generic exception (ie, UserCreationException) for the calling process to catch. the action can then populate the errors with a generic process error message ("there was a system problem trying to create your account. try again or send an email to....").
The point of all this is my data validation is kept in one place so I can swap the interface as needed. The only commonality between all interfaces would be the use of an ActionForm and a List to hold returned validation 'exceptions'. And I have no problem with that. the Form is just a POJO for all intents and purposes, as it should be. This leaves my interface to be business logic stupid, but interface/UI logic smart.
my $0.02.
From: "David Thielen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: "Struts Users Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Struts-Users" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: validation philosophical question Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 10:31:27 -0600
Hi;
Everyone who hits my site has a high-speed connection. So I am thinking that it makes sense to do server side validation only as that provides a better method than the javascript pop-ups.
And in this case, it seems to me that the logical place for all validation then is inside the ActionForm validate method.
comments?
thanks - dave
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