@madpilot makes

I quite like CakePHP – in fact, I find it rather difficult to do site without it now. It makes everything so much easier, especially the ActiveModel classes. However, I have found the validation model a little lacking. The way it is currently implemented only allows one validation expression for each database column, and you need to re-write the validation message on each page the model is used on. This is quite restrictive and error prone – if you need to add a field to the database, you have to update more than one page.

I have managed to modify the way the validators work, so that you can define a message and have multiple validation expressions for each field.

I used the modifications on the AccountancyAge Careers Fair by modifying the model.php file that lives in the Cake library directory and it worked really well, but I wanted to set it up so that I didn’t have to modify these files everytime – It is really inconvienient to have to re-make the changes when updating the library. This is expecially a problem at the moment, because there seems to be a new release candidate every other day (Which is great – can’t wait for version 1!)

Anyway, after a little digging, I found that it is possible to override the app_model.php file in the same way as you can override the default app_controller.php file. By placing a copy of the file in the app/ directory, Cake will use this file instead.

The modification

The modification as it stands overrides the invalidFields function of model.php (this is based on RC3 – RC4 should work ok as well). You can download the new app_model.php here.

To define validation rules, you add an associative array with the paramaters expression and message. This is probably best explained using an example. Say you have a required field called “post_code” that must not be empty and must be 4 digits, you could do the following:

var $validate = array(

‘post_code’ => array(

array(‘expression’ => VALID_NOT_EMPTY, ‘message’ => ‘You have not entered a post code’),

array(‘expression’ => ‘/d{4}/’, ‘message’ => ‘A postcode must be four digits’)

)

);

Easy as! There is one last thing though. To make it easier to display the messages, I have created the following user helper called validators.php (Drop it in to app/views/helpers) (Download validators.php here)

To use, you put the function < ?php echo $validators->tagErrorMessages() ?> (Don’t forget to include Validators in your helper array) which will generate a block message wrapped in div tags with the class “message”. You can customise this file if you don’t like the way it is displayed.

Happy baking :)