Displaying Form Error Messages from Array - php

Question

I wanted to incorporate GUMP https://github.com/Wixel/GUMP into my site for server side validation. But unfortunately the documentation is light and I am new to PHP.
Here is my validation code:
//Validation
$gump = new GUMP();
$rules = array(
'dept' => 'required|numeric',
'hosp' => 'required|numeric',
'subhosp' => 'required|numeric',
'user' => 'required|numeric',
'gpo' => 'required|boolean|exact_len,1',
'clin' => 'required|valid_name',
'clinmail' => 'required|valid_email',
'comp' => 'required|alpha_dash',
'cpt' => 'required|alpha_dash',
'past' => 'required|boolean|exact_len,1',
'latex' => 'required|boolean|exact_len,1',
);
$validated = $gump->validate($_POST,$rules);
print_r($validated); // Something went wrong
The output from the above code gives me an array like so when I am looking at my AJAX response in FireBug:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[field] => clin
[value] => .-0
[rule] => validate_valid_name
)
[1] => Array
(
[field] => clinmail
[value] => %$sd
[rule] => validate_valid_email
)
)
And I what I need is something like so:
<div class="error-msg">You did not enter a valid email address</div><br>
<div class="error-msg">You did not enter a valid username</div><br>
From the documentation I get:
if($validated === TRUE)
{
// Do something, everything went well
}
else
{
// This is where I am stuck. Do I have to loop through and put my <div> tags here?
}
My question is how would the community handle outputting error messages with this class? My only thought is that I loop through the results above and output different messages depending on the field and the rule that was broken but that seems tedious. Is there a better way or a better class to use that does standalone PHP input validation? I was using another very easy to use class but it started breaking when I moved away from inline PHP to AJAX.

Answer 1

edit your code to:
$gump = new GUMP();
$rules = array(
'dept' => 'required|numeric',
'hosp' => 'required|numeric',
'subhosp' => 'required|numeric',
'user' => 'required|numeric',
'gpo' => 'required|boolean|exact_len,1',
'clin' => 'required|valid_name',
'clinmail' => 'required|valid_email',
'comp' => 'required|alpha_dash',
'cpt' => 'required|alpha_dash',
'past' => 'required|boolean|exact_len,1',
'latex' => 'required|boolean|exact_len,1',
);
$error_texts = array(
'dept' => 'You must enter a numeric value',
'hosp' => 'You must enter a numeric value',
'subhosp' => 'You must enter a numeric value',
'user' => 'You must enter a numeric value',
'gpo' => 'You must enter a boolean value',
'clin' => 'You must enter a valid name',
'clinmail' => 'You must enter a valid email',
'comp' => 'You must enter a valid alpha dash',
'cpt' => 'You must enter a valid alpha dash',
'past' => 'You must enter 1 char',
'latex' => 'You must enter 1 char',
);
$validated = $gump->validate($_POST,$rules);
if($validated === TRUE)
{
echo "Every thing is ok";
}
else
{
foreach($validated as $key=>$error)
{
echo '<div class="error-msg">' . $error_texts["{$error['field']}"] . '</div><br />';
}
}

Answer 2

I would like to add that if a validation fails twice, for example if a value is required and has to exist out of more than 10 characters then #semsems answer would print multiple lines for the same field.
I changed the above code and added:
$_validated = array();
foreach($validated as $key=>$error)
{
if ( !in_array($error['field'], $_validated) )
{
print '<div class="error-msg">' . $error_texts["{$error['field']}"] . '</div>';
$_validated[] = $error['field'];
}
}

Answer 3

I know this question is a year old and been answered, but since I based myself on the accepted answer and in my view made it a sweet better (completely generic with locale as extra), I thought it would be nice to share and get some feedback... what do you guys think about my code? Now based on semsem's answer... I like the way he coded part of it and I derived from it to come up with the following code:
First I extended GUMP with my own class so I could overwrite some functions
<?php
require("gump.class.php");
class GumpValidator extends GUMP
{
private $locale;
private $translator;
public function GumpValidator($lang = "en")
{
$this->locale = $lang;
$this->loadValidationLocales();
}
/** Overwrite the default validate() function of GUMP so that I can add an extra "message" property */
public function validate(array $input, array $ruleset)
{
$validated_data = GUMP::validate($input, $ruleset);
if(is_array($validated_data)) {
foreach($validated_data as $index=>$error) {
$validation = str_replace(":attribute", $error['field'], $this->translator[$error['rule']]);
$validation = str_replace(":param", $error['param'], $validation);
$validated_data[$index++]['message'] = $validation;
}
}
return $validated_data;
}
/** Depending on the language locale, load the proper set of validation messages */
private function loadValidationLocales()
{
$this->translator = require "/lang/" . $this->locale . "/validation.php";
return $this->translator;
}
} // EOC
Then as you can see from the extended class, I created myself a set of locale language message for validation and I took the full list of possible validation errors directly from the GUMP code on Github, take a look at the function get_readable_errors() to get the full list of errors. Github link here... The locales which I created are saved under separate language folders /lang/en/validation.php, /lang/fr/validation.php, etc... You can easily create as many as you want... I took the concept from Laravel Framework... These validation.php files looks for example, like this (1 file per language/locale), here is the English one:
<?php
return array(
"validate_alpha" => "The :attribute may only contain letters.",
"validate_alpha_numeric" => "The :attribute may only contain letters and numbers.",
.....
);
Then finally in my POST to validate code I just call it like this:
// load my extended class with language locale I want to use
$gump = new GumpValidator("en");
// now validate the data
$validated_data = $gump->validate( $_POST, $rules );
So at the end I get the extra property of message inside the $validated_data object returned with the option of whichever locale language I chose to display the error message...and voilà!!! In my case I read the code in javascript to display the errors in Bootstrap alert, but if you want PHP you can look at semsem answer as well. So at the end, I know it takes more code since I have an extra class to wrap it and extra locales, but isn't sweet to first have it generic (per validation errors) and second to have multiple locale language easily?