Building An Extensible Form Validator Class - Under Construction (
Page 9 of 12 )
So that takes care of
the basic validation routines. As you can see, it's fairly easy to add new ones
to the class, as per your specific requirements. All that's left now are a
couple of methods to access the error list.
The first of these is a
simple little method named isError(), which lets you know whether or not any
errors have occurred yet. Internally, all this method does is check the size of
the $_errorList array; if the size of the array is greater than 1, it implies
that one or more errors have occurred while validating the form data. Take a
look:
<?php
class FormValidator
{
// snip
// check whether any errors have occurred in validation
// returns Boolean
function isError()
{
if (sizeof($this->_errorList) > 0)
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
}
?>
Of course, all isError() does is tell you whether or not an
error occurred; it won't let you view the list of errors. For that, you need the
getErrorList() method, which returns the current $_errorList array.
<?php
class FormValidator
{
// snip
// return the current list of errors
function getErrorList()
{
return $this->_errorList;
}
}
?>
Short and sweet!
Finally, how about resetting the
error list? Well, that's why I have the resetErrorList() method, which clears
the $_errorList array of all data.
<?php
class FormValidator
{
// snip
// reset the error list
function resetErrorList()
{
$this->_errorList = array();
}
}
?>
It's a good idea to run this resetErrorList() method whenever
the class is first instantiated - which is why I've added it to the class
constructor.
<?php
class FormValidator
{
// snip
// constructor
// reset error list
function FormValidator()
{
$this->resetErrorList();
}
}
?>
In case you didn't already know, PHP makes it possible to
automatically execute a specific function when a new instance of a class is
spawned. This function is referred to as a "constructor" and must have the same
name as the class. Which, if you look at the code above, is exactly what I've
done.
