Form Validation Sucks.

This is just a rant.

I am so sick of validating forms. I do all that I can to make it easy and whatnot, but it still comes back to spite me! Here are two examples of things that are dumb:

🔗 Checkboxes

So html checkboxes are SO DUMB. If they are checked, the value is set to ‘on.’ That’s annoying alone, but if the checkbox is not set it doesn’t even get submitted! Anyway, that’s pretty annoying. I made a little utility function that lets me just do something like this:

$self->fix_checkbox($_) for (qw{is_foo is_bar});

That works ok I guess. It just feels ghetto.

🔗 Blank != NULL

This is less about forms and more just about how suck I am of this stupid stuff. So let’s say you have some numbers fields in your db. If a person wants to leave the number blank, it gets submitted as “. Unfortunately that is not a valid number. So you have to convert the ” to undef to get it to store into the database as a NULL. That’s annoying right? No?

Blah. I’m done.

Posted Thu, Jul 9, 2009

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