TYPO3.Flow

I went into the same problems two weeks ago and tried to come up with a good solution.

I would highly prefer to enable proper disjunction usage over breaking the current behavior. Validating "EmailAddress" in my eyes means "EmailAddress" and not "EmtpyString" (and thus, no "EmailAddress").

Allowing usage of OR (disjunction validator) would solve our problems much better and non-breaking I think.

Ps: I came up with some (EmailAddress OR Empty) syntax, but don't know if this is really the way to go.

Felix Oertel wrote:

I would highly prefer to enable proper disjunction usage over breaking the current behavior.

I thought about this quite a while and I'm pretty sure the new behavior makes much more sense.
E.g. when working with Forms (which is the most common scenario for Validators) you want to differentiate whether a field is required (the label gets an asterisk for example) and/or whether it should be a valid email address if specified.
I agree, that you would probably add NotEmpty as well in most cases, but the behavior is at least consistent. BTW: Some validation engines I looked at handle it the same (only they call it "required" and not "NotEmpty" which is maybe a better choice)

Felix Oertel wrote:

Ps: I came up with some (EmailAddress OR Empty) syntax, but don't know if this is
really the way to go.

What syntax did you come up with by the way?

Bastian Waidelich wrote:

I thought about this quite a while and I'm pretty sure the new behavior makes much more sense.

I (we) thought about it some more and now I'm not so sure anymore ;)
At least in domain models an optional email address is rather an edge case. So if we found a nice way to specify validation rules as logical or this would be a good solution too.

Something like

@FLOW3\ValidateFirst({type="NotEmpty"}, {type="StringLength", options={maximum=100}})

only nicer.. ;)

Yeah, this is exactly, what I talked about in the first place. ;-)

I did some testing implementation (in extbase of course) and found, that specifying validators in the disjunction validator's options were much too complex and error prone. So I thought that probably a simple but new syntax would be good

@validate $email (NotEmpty OR EmailAddress)

or

@validate $email ((Empty OR StringLength(maximum=100)) OR EmailAddress)

• look if the first char is "("
• look for "AND" or "OR"
• trigger parsing of the seperate validators again and join in con- or disjunction

This would even allow to nest validations as the first char of the first parsed/nested expression can be a "(" again.

As long as it's forbidden to use AND and OR in the same nesting level, it should be fairly simple to implement.

Patch set 2 for branch master has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/8691

Patch set 3 for branch master has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/8691

Patch set 4 for branch master has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/8691

As discussed in todays daily scrum meeting we'll change the validators as suggested in the first changeset (with some refactoring to reduce the amount of code duplication) because it is the expected behavior.
Besides the NotEmpty validator should be renamed to "Required" (see #33537)

Patch set 5 for branch master has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/8691

can this be backported (is this the correct word?) for TYPO3 as well?