Treacherous

A modern async validation system to be used on the server or in the browser as well as with or without view frameworks.

It is an attempt to bring some consistency to validation in the javascript world you can write your validation rules in a single way a single time and re-use it anywhere you want without worrying about each framework/platforms many different validation paradigms or libraries.

Features / Benefits

• Fully async validation
• Separation of rules and validation allowing composable rulesets
• Supports nested complex objects/arrays
• Outside in validation, does not augment your models in any way
• Can be integrated with any front end framework*
• Works in browser or server

* = Currently supports knockout, [aurelia] (https://github.com/grofit/treacherous-aurelia), others coming soon.

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Installing

Via NPM

Just do an npm install treacherous

In browser

As this is distributed as a commonjs module it is recommended that you consume it via your existing module loader, or in the scenario where you do not have one it is recommended that you use webpack to just package it up as a UMD module to consume.

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Simple Examples

Validating simple models

var simpleModel = {
    foo: 20,
    bar: "hello"
};

var ruleset = Treacherous.createRuleset()
    .forProperty("foo")
        .addRule("required")        // The property is required
        .addRule("maxValue", 20)    // The property needs a value <= 20
    .forProperty("bar")
        .addRule("maxLength", 5)     // The property neds a length <= 5
    .build();
    
var validationGroup = Treacherous.createGroup(simpleModel, ruleset);

validationGroup.isValid()
    .then(function(isValid){
        console.log(isValid); // should write true
    });

Validating simple arrays in models

var Treacherous = require("treacherous");

var simpleModel = {
    foo: [10, 20, 30]
};

var ruleset = Treacherous.createRuleset()
    .forProperty("foo")
        .addRule("maxLength", 5)        // The array can only contain <= 5 elements
        .addRuleForEach("maxValue", 20) // Each element needs a value <= 20
    .build();
    
var validationGroup = Treacherous.createGroup(simpleModel, ruleset);

validationGroup.getModelErrors()
    .then(function(errors){
        console.log(errors); // should contain { "foo[2]": "<some error about max value>" }
    });

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Creating Validation Groups

The validation group is the object which manages validation state, you can find out a lot more information on this within the docs.

Here are a few simple examples to save you trawling the docs.

Check current validity

var validationGroup = Treacherous.createGroup(simpleModel, ruleset);

validationGroup.isValid()
    .then(function(isValid){
        // true is valid, false is invalid
    ));

Get all errors

var validationGroup = Treacherous.createGroup(...);

validationGroup.getModelErrors()
    .then(function(propertyErrors){...));

Subscribe validation changes

var validationGroup = Treacherous.createGroup(...);

validationGroup.propertyStateChangedEvent.subscribe(function(propertyValidationChangedEvent){...));

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Validation rules

The framework comes with built in validators for the following:

• date - The value is expressible as a date
• decimal - The value is expressible as a float/single
• email - The value conforms to a valid email address
• equal - The value is equal to another value
• isoDate - The value conforms to a valid ISO date format
• maxLength - The value must have a length <= value
• maxValue - The value must have a value <= value
• minLength - The value must have a length >= value
• minValue - The value must have a value >= value
• notEqual - The value is not equal to another value
• number - The value is expressible as an integer
• regex - The value matches the regex pattern
• required - The value is not a null-like value
• step - The value conforms to the numeric steps provided

Creating custom rules

So if you want to make your own rule you need to do 2 things, one is create the rule handler class which should conform to the IValidationRule interface, once you have done the validator you then need to register it so the validation system is aware of it, to do that you need to call Treacherous.ruleRegistry.registerRule(new SomeCustomValidator());.

To find out more read the Custom Rules docs.

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Documentation

Just look in the docs folder for more documentation on certain scenarios or subject matters.

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Developing

If you want to develop it further just clone the repo, npm install and gulp it should then provide you a working version to play with. If you want to minify it you can do gulp minify which will minify the output files, we don't minify by default.

You can also run gulp run-tests which will run the tests to make sure everythign works as expected.

Translations

This is a todo, if needed this will probably be implemented by having a class representing the validation message for a given language linked via the ruleName for now all messages are in english but feel free to raise this if you need this functionality sooner rather than later.

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Why should I use it?

There are LOTS of validation frameworks out currently, some synchronous, some are async, some work off the DOM some work off models. Some of them are tied to specific front end frameworks, others are mainly for the node world.

However in most cases you will be hard pressed to find a easy to use async based one which is agnostic of frameworks/platforms but can be plugged into them. This was the idea behind Treacherous, a simple validation framework which could be shared between browser and server as well as being able to expose MVVM style subscriptions for other frameworks to hook into.

If you share code between multiple worlds (i.e nodejs, browser, mobile) then you may have had issues before where you are tied into a specific framework for your front ends and want to re-use your models in the back end as a contractual layer or something. In these cases you often either end up maintaining 2 sets of validation which is ok, but it could be better, and this is where Treacherous attempts to improve this approach.

It is also useful for libraries which contain pure data concerns and have no notion of front end frameworks, so you may have one central library and have one front end using ng and one front end using aurelia or knockout for different devices etc. In this case you can have validation as a pure data concern and just plug the validation logic into your MVVM framework so it will automatically listen for the validation concerns letting you re-use more of your code base in a more consistent way.

Ultimately each framework tends to have it's own validation system, but with Treacherous you can write your validation rules once, and consume them anywhere (that has a compatible binding layer).