Jonathan Snook continues his look at the CakePHP framework today with this new post on his blog, specifically looking at data validation methods.

Validation is one of the basic and most tedious tasks in application development. If there was ever a reason to use a framework this would be it. There are two ways that appear to be advocated by the CakePHP site and while both have benefits, I'm using a slightly different approach.

The "two ways" he mentions are auto-validation and using the validates() function (different from the suggestion in the CakePHP wiki of overriding the beforeSave() function). The first is built-in functionality, and is simpler to use. It allows you to define custom profiles for your values, ensuring they match the requirements. Using the validates() function is actually overriding a standard function and can be used to do more custom validation on the values passed back in.

Jonathan Snook continues his look at the CakePHP framework today with this new post on his blog, specifically looking at data validation methods.

Validation is one of the basic and most tedious tasks in application development. If there was ever a reason to use a framework this would be it. There are two ways that appear to be advocated by the CakePHP site and while both have benefits, I'm using a slightly different approach.

The "two ways" he mentions are auto-validation and using the validates() function (different from the suggestion in the CakePHP wiki of overriding the beforeSave() function). The first is built-in functionality, and is simpler to use. It allows you to define custom profiles for your values, ensuring they match the requirements. Using the validates() function is actually overriding a standard function and can be used to do more custom validation on the values passed back in.