CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpvalidationcakephpdecimal
elitalon
elitalon

Reputation: 9437

Validating and transforming decimal values in CakePHP

I'm developing an application with CakePHP that handles monetary values. The client wants the numbers to have a custom format like 1.275,34, i.e. a dot as the delimiter in the integer part and a comma as the delimiter of the decimal part.

I'm wondering what's the best approach to manage this, since i need to do two basic things:

  1. Validate values written in forms according to that custom format.
  2. Transform those values according to the format expected by MySQL's column data type (decimal(18,2) in this case, 1275.34 in the example above).

I think I have these options but I'm not completely happy with any because several models work with that custom format and that means replicating some code:

What do you recommend? Is there any other approach to handle this?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 5

Views: 4804

Answers (2)

Daniel Wright
Daniel Wright

Reputation: 4604

The "1.234,56" format is the European money format, so you're probably better off making the entire app use this format. What you need to do is set the monetary locale of your app, using setlocale(LC_MONETARY,$locale). So, for example:

setlocale(LC_MONETARY, 'it_IT');

Then, you use money_format to format your currency strings appropriately, and use a Model::beforeValidate() callback to massage any currency input before validation, so you can validate against standard decimal format. This related question may be useful.

Upvotes: 1

JohnP
JohnP

Reputation: 50019

You can use PHPs number_format() to format it any way you like : http://php.net/manual/en/function.number-format.php

As for hooking it in, you can use the beforeSave() and afterFind() callbacks to do the transformation, if you want do it in the model.

http://book.cakephp.org/view/1048/Callback-Methods

I would suggest you keep an extra field that is populated in the model model after a find operation using the callbacks above so it's always available to you and doesn't mess up if you accidentally try to save it.

ALSO You could use virtualFields (available from cakePHP 1.3) to create a field that is populated by the DB on every find. You could use MySQLs string formatting to achieve this.

Virtual Field : http://book.cakephp.org/view/1608/Virtual-fields

MySQL string : http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html#function_format

An example would be 

var $virtualFields = array(
    'formatted' => 'FORMAT(12332.1,2)' // would output 12,332.10
);

Upvotes: 2

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