Building An Extensible Form Validator Class - The Bare Bones (
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So that's the theory.
Let's now spend a few minutes discussing the rationale behind the FormValidator
object I plan to build.
Stripped down to its bare bones, my FormValidator
class consists of two components:
1. A series of methods that accept the
data to be validated as method arguments, test this data to see whether or not
it is valid (however "valid" may be defined within the scope of the method), and
return an appropriate result code.
2. A PHP structure (here, an
associative array) that holds a list of all the errors encountered during the
validation process, and a series of methods to manipulate this
structure.
As you will see, these two basic components make it possible
to build a very simple (and yet very useful) FormValidator object, one that
exposes a number of generic methods. It's important to note, however, that these
methods will have nothing to do with the visual presentation of either the form
or the form's result page; rather, they provide a simple API to perform
validation of the data entered into the form, and are designed for use by
server-side scripts which are more closely connected to the presentation
layer.
