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Widget Form Validation with Schemas

In the simple form widget tutorial you saw how to create a simple form with widgets and how to validate the input to the fields of the form by attaching a validator instance to each form field when it was instantiated.

This is fine as long as the successful validation of a field only depends only on the value of the field itself. There are, however, situations where this is not enough. Examples:

  • You want to make certain that the user has filled in at least two (or three, four, etc.) fields within a group of fields, but you don’t care which.
  • You want to check that the values of two related fields match, e.g. a password entry with a confirmation field.
  • You want to do some consistency or plausibility checks on the submitted data as a whole, e.g. when the user entered an address, you could check that the city he entered actually exists in the country he also specified, or you could check the validity of credit card information (credit card number, expiry date and security code).

For problems like these, validation schemas are the answer. A validation schema is a collection of validators, both simple and compound combined into a validators.Schema. A compound validator consists of several field validators – the same ones you used in the previous tutorial – that work together. Technically, field validators are sub-classes of validators.FancyValidator (validator.NotEmpty, validator.UnicodeString, etc.) while compound validators inherit from validators.CompoundValidator. Conveniently Schema itself is a compound validator, which allows schemas to be nested.

The FormEncode site has some basic documentation about schemas and what you can do with them, but when referring to it, bear one caveat in mind: TurboGears defines a few extra validators and overrides the behavior of some of the FormEncode classes. So, when you use validators in TurboGears, instead of importing from formencode, always use the following:

from turbogears import validators

Simple Validation Schemas

Now that we’ve seen what validation schemas are, we’ll walk through a few examples to show how they’re used. Let’s start simple:

class EmailFormSchema(validators.Schema):
    id = validators.Int(not_empty=True)
    name = validators.UnicodeString(not_empty=True, max=50, strip=True)
    email = validators.Email(not_empty=True, max=255, strip=True)

This schema validates a simple dataset that should consist of an integer ID, a Unicode string and another string with a (syntactically) valid email address. Let’s build a simple form widget that can submit a matching dataset:

class EmailFormFields(widgets.WidgetsList):
    id = widgets.HiddenField('id')
    name = widgets.TextField('name',
      label=_(u'Name'),
      attrs=dict(maxlength=50),
      help_text=_(u'Your name. Required'))
    email = widgets.TextField('email',
      label=_(u'Email'),
      attrs=dict(maxlength=255),
      help_text=_(u'Your email address. Required'))

Note that the names of the form field widgets (i.e. the first argument to the widget constructor) are the same as the attribute names of the matching validators in the schema. As a convenience, you can leave this argument out if the name is the same as the matching attribute in the WidgetsList. It’s included here because we’re being pedantic. Now we need to pack the widgets into a form:

email_form = widgets.TableForm(
    name="emailform",
    fields=EmailFormFields(),
    validator=EmailFormSchema())

If you compare this to the example in the simple form widget tutorial, you’ll see that we only add the validator argument to the form constructor, passing a reference to an instance of the validation schema.

The usage of the form in your controller is exactly the same as if you attached the validators directly to the form field widgets. In fact, the validators you attach to the individual fields are turned into a schema behind the scenes by TurboGears:

@expose()
@validate(form=email_form)
@error_handler(show_form)
def save(self, id, name, email):
    # save data here
    # id, name and email will be guaranteed to be present
    # and contain values of the right type
    # if not, the error_handler method ('show_form' here) will be called
    pass

So what have we gained by using a schema so far? Admittedly not much, but we have separated the definition of the form fields from that of the validators, which some (including this author) prefer. In the next sections we will use schemas to do more clever things.

Compound Validators

Before we examine how to use schemas to check several fields in combination, we’ll have a look at a simpler, but also very useful way to combine validators: the compound validators validators.All and validators.Any.

These two validator classes allow you to apply several validators to the same field at the same time, acting similar to the AND resp. OR operator in boolean logic. As an example, let’s say that we would like to allow the user to enter either an email address or a URL (i.e. his homepage address):

class EmailFormSchema(validators.Schema):

    ...

    email = validators.Any(
      validators.Email(strip=True),
      validators.URL(add_http=True)
    )

That was simple, huh? Let’s try validators.All:

class EmailFormSchema(validators.Schema):

    ...

    name = validators.All(
      validators.UnicodeString(not_empty=True, max=50, strip=True),
      validators.Regex(r'^\w+\s+\w+$')
    )

This would require that the name is a string (which will be converted to unicode) no longer than 50 characters and that it is of the form word, whitespace, word, e.g. a first and lastname like “John Meyer”, but not just “John” or “John D. Smith”.

Tip

You can also use compound validators when attaching a validator to a widget with the validator keyword argument to its constructor:

email = widgets.TextEntry('email'
    validator=validators.Any(
      validators.Email(strip=True),
      validators.URL(add_http=True)
    )
)

Chained Validators

A big advantage of validation schemas is that they allow you to validate the whole of the form data after the values of the each form fields have been validated by themselves. This feature is called chained validators. Let’s extend our example form with two password entry fields. The user must enter the same password into both fields for the validation to be successfull. First we define the new form field widgets:

class EmailFormFields(widgets.WidgetsList):

    ...

    password = widgets.PasswordField(
      label=_(u'Password'),
      attrs=dict(maxlength=50),
      help_text=_(u'Specify your password.'))
    password_confirm = widgets.PasswordField(
      label=_(u'Confirm'),
      attrs=dict(maxlength=50),
      help_text=_(u'Enter the password again to confirm.'))

And now we extend the validation schema:

class EmailFormSchema(validators.Schema):

    ...

    password = validators.UnicodeString(max=50)
    password_confirm = validators.UnicodeString(max=50)
    chained_validators = [
      validators.FieldsMatch('password', 'password_confirm')
    ]

And that’s it. The FieldsMatch validator checks that the value of the two fields are the same (i.e., that the password matches the confirmation). If they don’t, the form will be rediplayed with the error message “Fields do not match” (or similar) next to the password and confirmation fields.

Tip

If you’re using using fields with validator arguments rather than explicit schemas, you can still make use of chained_validators. Simply create a Schema containing only chained_validators and pass that as the Form’s validator:

class EmailForm(ListForm):
    validator = validators.Schema(
        chained_validators=[
            validators.FieldsMatch('password','password_confirm')
        ])
    fields = EmailFormFieldsWithValidators()

Using Custom Validators in Schemas

FormEncode allows you to define your own custom validators rather easily by subclassing the validators.FancyValidator class. This example will check that email addresses entered in our form have to conform to <name>@somedomain.tld, where <name> is the name entered in the “Name” field with spaces replaced by dots, i.e. if the user entered "Joe Doe" as the name, the email will have to match something like "Joe.Doe@somedomain.tld". Here’s our custom validator:

class EmailMatchesName(validators.FancyValidator):
    def _to_python(self, value, state):
        name = value.get('name', '').replace(' ', '.')
        email_prefix = value.get('email', '').split('@', 1)[0]
        if email_prefix != name:
            raise validators.Invalid(
                'Email does not conform to naming rules.',
                value, state)
        return value

The custom validator defines the method _to_python, which receives a value and a state argument. The latter is not important for our purpose now, we are only interested in the contents of the value argument. When using this validator as a chained validator, value will be a dictionary with the data from the whole form after all fields have been validated on their own. We can pick the values for the fields we’re interested in from this dictionary and, if our validation condition fails, raise a validators.Invalid exception instance with an appropriate message.

Conclusion

Validation schemas are a powerful tool to define complex behavior for widget forms. In basic usage they only provide separation of form field declarations from their matching validators.

When combining the chained validators feature with custom validators, you can use schemas to check interdependencies between form fields or implement dynamic validation rules where the requirements for some fields depend on external resources or events.

Download the Example Project

To run the example project, which shows a simple form with two password fields, validated by a chained validator, download the tarball, extract, change into the FormsValidationTutorial-1.0 directory and run:

./start-formvaltut.py

FormValidationTutorial-1.0.tar.gz