I was thinking today about how it would be useful to have some the
option to do some kinds of validations on field values in Thrift
objects. For instance, say you have a struct with a field "required
string blah". You've managed to specify that it must be part of the
struct, but nothing else. What if you also want to demand that it's a
non-empty string? Or if it needs to be of a certain length? These are
things that would make the generated code a lot more convenient to
use at times.
There are potentially a lot of these validations you could create,
but most of them would be pretty trivial to implement in multiple
languages. String, byte[], and collection length would be one simple
one. Greater/less than for numeric fields would be another. One
potentially tricky but awesome one would be "must match regex"
validation on string fields.
Clearly these validations might have a performance implication, so
you probably wouldn't expect the to be run by default on all structs,
though it'd be sensible to be able to enable and disable them
globally so you can switch from development to production mode
easily. You could always have access to the functionality via a
public validate() method that would tell you true or false if the
struct contained the proper fields.
Do others think this would be interesting? It'd potentially introduce
a lot of work in making sure each different validation was
implemented across languages, but that would be mitigated by not
having to have your application developers write the validation code
in all the languages you use.
-Bryan
- Idea: Validations Bryan Duxbury
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