CODEWITHSUNDEEP
yii2
mrateb
mrateb

Reputation: 2509

Yii2 - ActiveRecord Validation vs Form Validation

This is a question about best practices. In general, when is it better to use Form Validation (i.e: Create a form for the request being sent). And when is it better to rely on the ActiveRecord validation.

Example: I have a model Customer and model Address where each customer has more than one address. In the form to create Customer, I want to send more than one address 

{
  "name": "customer",
  "vat_no": "12345678",
  "time_zone": 277,
  "category": 1,
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "addresses":[
    {
        "street_address": "abcd...",
        "phone": 1234567
    },
    {
        "street_address": "hdhdh...",
        "phone": 2345678
    }
]}

**This is a question inspired by a previous question that I asked here Yii2 - Validating nested objects, and specifically about the answer given there

Upvotes: 0

Views: 160

Answers (2)

ldg
ldg

Reputation: 9402

It partly depends how closely your form aligns to your models - e.g., how much will you need to transform the form data, are the validation rules the same and how many models are required.

In your case, if there are only 2 models and the logic is pretty clear that the primary model is Customer and secondary is Address, it's really personal preference. You could use a scenario for the form and have scenario-specific rules in the existing models or in a dedicated Form model. If, for whatever reason, the form fields have different validation requirements than the database, it might be cleaner to have them in a separate model.

Ultimately the code has to go somewhere, so you want to think about what's going to make the most sense for you to maintain -- e.g., you want to keep data functions out of the controller, so do you want to use the CustomerController or create one for this purpose? If you use a Form model, you might then want a matching controller and keep the primary models focused on table-specific CRUD operations.

Upvotes: 3

Patrick
Patrick

Reputation: 1338

It is always a best practice to keep the size of your code base to a minimum.

Thus, if using multiple models works for you, don't create (unnecessary) extra code by adding a form model.

Upvotes: 0

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