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List:       xml-cocoon-users
Subject:    Re: Best practices for validating request params?
From:       Simon Price <simon.price () bristol ! ac ! uk>
Date:       2003-06-28 22:46:04
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You may want to take a look at the (from my dodgy memory) req-params 
action which does a simple existential check on request parameters. 
There's an example of its use in the modular database sample code's sitemap.

Cheers

Simon

Sonny Sukumar wrote:
> 
> Hi guys,
> 
> I was wondering what the best way is to validate request parameters.  I 
> have a few questions:
> 
> 1.) What is the best way to validate the *existence* of all expected 
> request params (both for simple queries and for posting form data)?
> 
> By this, I mean I'd ideally like to notify the client if any request 
> param wasn't sent.  I was thinking I could write a dedicated action to 
> do this validation before another action extracts/formats the values.
> 
> 2.) Do you think it is even a good practice to take the time/effort/cpu 
> power to validate that all expected request params were sent and notify 
> the client if they were not?
> 
> Otherwise, my action that extracts/formats the values would just end up 
> throwing things like NullPointerExceptions, NumberFormatExceptions, etc. 
> when it tries to extract/format the values.  This doesn't seem very 
> elegant at all to me, even if I do wrap them in ProcessingExceptions 
> before throwing them.
> 
> One other reason I don't want to throw these seemingly odd and random 
> exceptions is because they'll just give a stack trace that says my code 
> failed on Line XXX.  On my team we have another development group that 
> is working on buiding the actual XHTML webpages and making sure they 
> work with the backend.  So these sorts of exceptions and stack traces 
> won't help them at all to figure out what went wrong.  If I notify them 
> they forgot a param, they can say "Oh , I forgot to pass the XYZ 
> param--that's why it's failing" and fix their XHTML code in short order.
> 
> I'm interested to hear all of your thoughts!
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Sonny
> 
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