I haven’t dug into it in depth yet, but this is looking pretty good. I think a nice addition would be to allow specification of a default value. If a var is defined in your FormBroker DDL-type specification, a default value isn’t defined, and the value is not present in the response, the broker would raise an error. Otherwise if the default value is provided but the value isn’t in the response, the default would be provided.
Another thing… at work we have been leaning toward copying values as they are checked and possibly transformed from the response array into a new array. That way there’s no risk that a value in the response array gets used downstream without having been explicitly called out. An alternative approach would be to remove any value from the response array that isn’t in the broker specification (and possibly treat the presence of something unexpected as a fatal error). One way or another I think it is important that a response value not be able to be used downstream without being explicitly called out in the broker specification. On 10/17/16, 10:29 AM, "Massimo Manghi" <mxman...@apache.org> wrote: An initial prototype of the Rivet's FormBroker is now available from trunk/rivet/packages/formbroker.tcl The code is inspired by Karl's original code but it goes further ahead trying to become a form definition repository. The overall style of the package has an OOP flavor even though no one of the OOP environments available for Tcl was used. It's just 'namespace ensemble' based. I will henceforth use the word 'object' meaning any instance of form descriptor created by the FormBroker package. Forms definition objects are referenced through commands generated by the FormBroker package with the 'create' call set fbobj [::FormBroker create \ {var1 string bounds 10 constrain quote} \ {var2 email} \ {var3 integer bounds 10} \ {var4 unsigned bounds {10 100} constrain}] which is quite similar to the original form broker: each element in the argument list is a list in its own right in which the first and second element must be the form variable name and type. At the moment supported types are 'string', 'integer', 'unsigned', 'email'. Each of them has its own validation procedure. The supported variable types can be extended easily, but non portably: I mean that writing a validator requires explicit manipulation of the dictionary that provides a form variable internal representation. (As such it's a design flaw, at the moment). The keyword 'constrain' means that, when possible, a value is brought within its assigned bounds. For a 'string' it means the string has to be truncated to be n characters when longer. The namespace ensemble offers also a 'creategc' method that demands a Tcl variable name as first argument. The command name is returned and also stored in the named Tcl variable. When this Tcl variable is destroyed the unset trace that ensues triggers the object destructor to be called, causing the form internal representation to be garbage collected... A form response is then checked calling $fbobj validate response where 'response' is the usual array of variables made by ::rivet::load_response. This method returns 'true' if the array validates. If the validation fails the method $fbobj failing returns a list of variable names with the validation error codes. Variables can be quoted and the quoting function can be customized (the internal function just puts a variable value between single quotes). A custom function for quoting must have the very basic form set quoted_string [<quoting-proc> $orig_string] the need for quotation can be variable specific (in that case 'validate' quotes in the 'response' array only the variables eligible to be quoted). Overall quoting can be forced by calling $fbobj validate -forcequote response There is more to say but I don't want to bother you any further. I will answer your questions with pleasure. The namespace ensemble API is open to be amended if you have some strong idea on how to redesign it. I won't set out writing the documentation any soon: I'm going to allow more time to see if the design settle down using the package in regular development (which I still have to do!). If you're interested to write a specific data type validator I will show you how to (there's an example in trunk/contrib/validate_mac.tcl which shows how to validate a mac address) -- Massimo P.S. I will certainly remove the 'namespace export *' line from the package in order to keep private all the methods not intended for application level programming --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: rivet-dev-unsubscr...@tcl.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: rivet-dev-h...@tcl.apache.org