I don't have the time to try this out soon, but the concepts seem OK.
The question on my mind is (I live and work in a country/company that uses multiple laguages): are you thinking of adding an explicit way to handle localisation of the messages, or should the "nesting" of messages suffice? I won't mind writing something like
MyDictionary.getValue("en.mymessage")
or
MyDictionary.getValue("mymessage.en")
but I worry a bit about the maintainability of the messages... and I think
MyDictionary.getValue ("mymessage", "en")
would be cleaner. Have to go now, but I'll think this over during the weekend!
Wouter
On Mar 10, 2006, at 18:54, Doug Hughes wrote:
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Hey all,
I just committed a large change to validation. In the past there was an ErrorManager that would read data from the ErrorMessages.xml. There were a few problems with this:
1) Contextually, it was specific to error messages. It was illogical to add other messages into that document.
2) All data for all objects was stored in one big file.
3) The ErrorMessage.xml was only generated or updated when a record was.
4) More, but I'm too lazy to get into it.
I've added a new type of object, a Dictionary to Reactor. You can now, if need be, call createDictionary(name) on the reactorFactory. This will return a very simple reactor.dictionary.dictionary object which has one method, getValue().
The dictionary object reads a dictionary xml file stored under /yourDataMapping/Dictionary/yourObjectNamedictionary.xml. Each dictionary XML file is created for one type of object and has a structure like this:
<dictionary>
<teacherId>
<label>teacherId</label>
<comment/>
<notProvided>The teacherId field is required but was not provided.</notProvided>
<invalidType>The teacherId field does not contain valid data. This field must be a numeric value.</invalidType>
</teacherId>
… (more nodes for each field) …
</dictionary>
The teacherId node represents one field. You can get messages out of the dictionary with the Dictionary object's getValue method. For example:
MyDictionary.getValue("teacherId.label")
That will return the label text.
MyDictionary.getValue("teacherId.invalidType")
That will return the invalidType text.
You can add as many messages in there as you want. I haven't tested it, but I'm pretty sure you can nest other messages, etc. For example, this might work:
<dictionary>
<mymessage>Foobar</mymessage>
<teacherId>
<label>teacherId</label>
<comment/>
<notProvided>The teacherId field is required but was not provided.</notProvided>
<invalidType>The teacherId field does not contain valid data. This field must be a numeric value.</invalidType>
</teacherId>
… (more nodes for each field) …
</dictionary>
MyDictionary.getValue("mymessage")
If you delete any one of the generated messages (for example, teacherId.notProvided) it will be regenerated (when not in production mode).
I suggest keeping all your validation messages in your Dictionary XML files.
The label and comment messages can be used with something like form generators. You can update your label to be human readable. You could also add a comment and then just pass the record or dictionary into a custom tag that generates a form field for you (or something). I've been thinking about other messages that could be in here by default, but nothing else comes to mind.
To start using this get latest and delete your project files. You'll probably want to move your error messages into the new dictionaries and to delete your old xml file.
Doug
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