Validation Rules

Last updated Mar 5th, 2021 | Page history | Improve this page | Report an issue

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Overview¶

Your XML schema can define validation rules using nodes in the XML that follow this pattern

<validation>
    <rule field="$name_of_field"
        name="$name_of_rule"
        type="callable|preg_match|xPDOValidationRule"
        rule="$various"
        value="$optional_parameter"
        message="string" />
</validation>

The rule may have have these attributes:

field: the field's name. (required)
name: a unique name for this validation rule. You can have multiple validation rules for each field. (required)
Type: can be "callable", "preg_match" or "xPDOValidationRule" (required)
rule: varies depending on the type. For type=callable, this will be the name of the callback function. For type=preg_match, this will be the regular expression. For type=xPDOValidationRule, a valid child class must be supplied. (required)
value: an optional argument to pass to the validation functions, e.g. when the type is xPDOValidationRule and the rule is a class that extends it. (optional)
message: this is a string describing the the validation rule if it fails. (required) In MODX 2+, the message field contains a lexicon string which can provide language specific message translations.

<rule field="category" name="preventBlank" type="xPDOValidationRule" rule="xPDOMinLengthValidationRule" value="1" message="category_err_ns_name" />

Regex Validation¶

Let's take this example from the modChunk schema:

<object class="modChunk" table="site_htmlsnippets" extends="modElement">
    <field key="name" dbtype="varchar" precision="50" phptype="string" null="false" default="" index="unique" />
    <!-- ... more fields here -->
    <validation>
        <rule field="name" name="invalid" type="preg_match" rule="/^(?!\s)[a-zA-Z0-9\x2d-\x2f\x7f-\xff_-\s]+(?!\s)$/" message="chunk_err_invalid_name" />
    </validation>
</object>

Callable Validation¶

You can use your own functions for validation purposes by using "callable" as the type -- this relies on PHP's call_user_func() function. Because the function name is defined in XML where it is impossible to reference an object instance, you can only reference a regular PHP function like my_function or a static class method, e.g. MyClass::myFunction. Additionally check this 'callable' Rule

xPDOValidationRule Validation¶

This is how you can tie-into the built-in MODX validation rules. See the classes available inside the core/xpdo/validation/xpdovalidator.class.php file:

xPDOMinLengthValidationRule
xPDOMaxLengthValidationRule
xPDOMinValueValidationRule
xPDOMaxValueValidationRule
xPDOObjectExistsValidationRule
xPDOForeignKeyConstraint

For example, look a the the rule defined for the modContentType

<object class="modContentType" table="content_type" extends="xPDOSimpleObject">
    <field key="name" dbtype="varchar" precision="255" phptype="string" null="false" index="unique" />
    <!-- ... more fields here ... -->
    <validation>
        <rule field="name" name="name" type="xPDOValidationRule" rule="xPDOMinLengthValidationRule" value="1" message="content_type_err_ns_name" />
    </validation>
</object>

Using xPDOValidator¶

You can use the xPDOValidator to pre-validate the current state of an xPDOObject or you can allow save() to call validation (see xPDO::OPT_VALIDATE_ON_SAVE) itself and fail if validation fails.

An example of pre-validation from MODX Revolution's modObjectCreateProcessor class:

/* run object validation */
if (!$this->object->validate()) {
    /** @var modValidator $validator */
    $validator = $this->object->getValidator();
    if ($validator->hasMessages()) {
        foreach ($validator->getMessages() as $message) {
            $this->addFieldError($message['field'],$this->modx->lexicon($message['message']));
        }
    }
}

An example of examining the validation messages after save() failure from MODX Revolution's modError class:

/* save object and report validation errors */
if (!$this->object->save()) {
    /** @var modValidator $validator */
    $validator = $this->object->getValidator();
    if ($validator->hasMessages()) {
        foreach ($validator->getMessages() as $message) {
            $this->addFieldError($message['field'],$this->modx->lexicon($message['message']));
        }
    }
}

Writing Your Own Validation Rules¶

If you want to write your own validation rules, you need to create a PHP class file inside of your namespace's model folder for each validation rule you define, e.g. core/components/my_pkg/model/my_pkg/my_validation_rule.class.php. The name should be all lowercase and include a .class.php extension. This is how xPDO knows how to find your class file (this is xPDO's "autoload-like" convention).

Let's look at a Custom Resource Class (CRC) that does not want to be nested under other CRC's -- it wants as its parent only the built-in MODX classes (modDocument, a WebLink, etc). Here's its XML schema definition:

<object class="MyCRC" extends="modResource">
    <composite alias="Things" cardinality="many" class="Things" foreign="parent" local="id" owner="local"></composite>
    <validation>
      <rule field="parent" message="Invalid parent" name="parent" rule="NormalParents" type="xPDOValidationRule"></rule>
    </validation>
</object>

And here's the corresponding validation rule from core/components/my_pkg/model/my_pkg/normalparents.class.php:

<?php /**
 * @param mixed $value candidate value
 * @param array $options from the XML schema
 * @return boolean false on failed validation, true on pass
 */
class NormalParents extends xPDOValidationRule {
    public function isValid($value, array $options = array()) {
        parent::isValid($value, $options);
        $result = false;
        $obj=& $this-?>validator->object;
        $xpdo=& $obj->xpdo;
                $xpdo->log(1, 'Running TaxonomyParents Validation rule');
        $validParentClasses = array('modDocument', 'modWebLink', 'modSymLink', 'modStaticResource');
        if ($obj->get('parent') === 0 || ($obj->Parent && in_array($obj->Parent->class_key, $validParentClasses))) {
           $result = true;
        }
        if ($result === false) {
            $this->validator->addMessage($this->field, $this->name, $this->message);
        }

        return $result;
    }
}