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This time the error's on me

An essential skill in life is the ability to laugh at yourself and to try not to take anything too seriously. This I find myself doing increasingly often. Only yesterday I found myself stood next to Karen, in a health spa, booking herself a facial-cleansing treatment/massage. Before I knew what I was doing I had asked the female receptionist "Do you do men?" and found myself booked in this afternoon for the full monty. Don't tell anyone will you!

Then I had to laugh at myself again this morning. Turns out the reason I couldn't get yesterday's server-side validation to correctly set the SaveOptions field was because I'd named it $SaveOptions by mistake.

So, the server-side validation is possible with some simple @Functions in the WebQuerySave event. As soon as I've got this month's out of the way I'll try and make this approach fool-proof and write it up as June's article. Thanks for all the feedback yesterday. Should come in handy when I get round to making the real thing.

There's a rudimentary example form here. You're welcome to try and break it...

Comments

    • avatar
    • Sandra Borges
    • Wed 26 May 2004 05:40 AM

    Sorry, I just broke it... :-P

    • avatar
    • Jake
    • Wed 26 May 2004 05:50 AM

    Woops. I forgot to test for " " entries in name. Fixed now. This isn't really what I meant by breaking it though. Forget what values are required and in what format, it's the principle of server-side validation that I want to test. There's no real way round it AFAIK.

    • avatar
    • Anon
    • Wed 26 May 2004 05:51 AM

    Maybe its just me, but "Do you do men?" in a massage parlour could mean something completly different!!!

    On the other hand, there is a program on Sky1 on Sunday that may interest you:

    "How Gay Are You?

    Sunday 30, 22:00, Sky One

    Tongue-in-cheek series which asks heterosexual men - as well as their girlfriends or wives - questions about their pastimes and lifestyles to try to find out just how in touch they are with their gay side. "

    Not that I'm suggesting anything!

    • avatar
    • Aden
    • Wed 26 May 2004 06:03 AM

    A facial-cleansing massage....

    Its official men are the new women...

    • avatar
    • Jake
    • Wed 26 May 2004 06:05 AM

    I've seen the trailer for that program. Is there not a man having a facial and the words with the line of the song being "Face cream is just gayness in a jar"? You see, you have to laugh. I mean I have manly hobbies too. Like taking photos of flowers: {Link}

    • avatar
    • Woah! I'm going to Ibiza!
    • Wed 26 May 2004 06:07 AM

    Going on holiday and the Mrs suggested I get spray-tan before we leave. I'll be standing in a paper thong later today whilst some bird laughs at my A4-white arse.

  1. Well I didn't break it exactly, but you might want to put a maximum age in the age field or even calculate it from a ligitimate dob field?

    If you hadn't had cucumber on your eyes you'd have spotted the $SaveOptions field 8)

    • avatar
    • Sourav
    • Wed 26 May 2004 09:15 AM

    Check your example...

    Validations around age and country code is not proper.. not expected from Jake Howlett !!!

    • avatar
    • Jake
    • Wed 26 May 2004 09:29 AM

    Thanks Sourav. I trim the country field as well now. As I said, it's rudimentary at this point. Whether or not the *actual* validation works or not is not the point really. What I am trying to prove is that you can do it server-side and, once it works properly, can't be UN-designed by a user with some JS know-how.

    • avatar
    • Pam
    • Wed 26 May 2004 10:28 AM

    Lets home Karen doesn't see your blog, otherwise your in trouble.. ;-)

    • avatar
    • Jake
    • Wed 26 May 2004 10:41 AM

    Why Pam? She was there. When I say "full monty" I'm not talking about anything rude.

    • avatar
    • Jon
    • Wed 26 May 2004 10:42 AM

    The age field will ignore text after a number but will accept the entry. For example, i entered my age as "2 long" which was accepted. I'm not sure this could be considered as breaking it, but fyi.

    • avatar
    • Jake
    • Wed 26 May 2004 11:22 AM

    Thanks Jon. Fixed that now. The age field is text and the validation simply checked @If(@IsError(@TextToNumber(Age));...

    What this didn't do was any Input Translation. As well as the validation I needed to add @TextToNumber to the translation. Otherwise it just remains as the text you entered. @TextToNubmer doesn't return an error with things like "3 is the magic number 3". Instead it simply returns 3.

    • avatar
    • Doug
    • Wed 26 May 2004 11:24 AM

    From reading the comments, it appears that you (Jake) have set the standards too high. :-)

    You mentioned that this was a "rudimentary" example, but we are still questioning your validations.

    Looking at that, all I can say is.... Jake, keep up the great work!

    • avatar
    • David Schmidt
    • Fri 28 May 2004 08:17 AM

    Well I didn't break it, but I managed to put the validation form out of business, by entering |SCRIPT|document.forms[0].style.display='none'|/SCRIPT|

    Sorry.

    • avatar
    • Jake
    • Fri 28 May 2004 08:24 AM

    Yeah, thanks David. I wanted you to test it, not hack it ;o)

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Written by Jake Howlett on Wed 26 May 2004

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