If we are to talk about the philosophy of validations, I would like to have people think it in a broader context, not only in the web tier.
Let's say we are to validate a person's home address. We need to ensure the address line, city, state, zip code are entered. Next, we might need to verify that the city and state are valid names and the zip code is actual postal zip code (not just 5 digits). Things get difficult if we want to check the zip code in the database. If the person is doing refinance, well, we might need to send an appraiser to the address to perform a survey. They are all business of *validations*. What I am trying to say here is that the validation could become an infinity business :-) It would not be accurate if we say a better design or practice is to put *all* validation logic in one place. For example, the DBA would impose declarative constraints on table columns. That's part of validation business. The foreign keys, store procedures, etc. could also be part of validation business. If we buy this rational, we would know there is no *one* place for validations. A better design or practice, I believe, would centralize the validation logic in each of technology layers, browsers, web tiers, ejb layers, database, etc. Such complicated problems should be dealt with phases. Using phased validation models, we could defer the complexity until we really need it. Without the concept of phases, some software tools are designed with irrational complexities. For example, if we only need a required field, why we have to go through so many steps to achieve it? Phases will provide a clue to modern application designs. The browser layer will do phase-0 validations, then the server-side will do phase-1, phase-2 validations, etc. I hope the rational will be considered at large... Jing Netspread Carrier http://www.netspread.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Thielen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Struts-Users" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 11:31 AM Subject: validation philosophical question 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
