On Validation: What's your first grade teacher's middle name?
I'm in the process of trying to figure out how i want to handle validation within MG Unity. There are a few options to explore. I'm studying how Reactor handles validation out of the box, using the specs for each field in the database as it's guide, and it reminded me of something ...
I needed to order a copy of my birth certificate a few weeks ago. There's a company online called Vitalchek.com that handles it for you for all 50 US states. There's only one "small" problem i ran into ... the validation routines screwed up my application entirely, because the developer looked at validation from a narrow data-centric perspective. As a result, the validation routine did not allow me to enter my valid phone number or zip code, and my birth certificate was sent to a non-existent city in Maine. UPS couldn't call me either to try and figure out what went wrong, so they just sent the birth cert back to the sender.
I also think you forgot one of the most common mistake USA-based developers do. They keep pretending your mail address include a "state". No need to say this doesn't apply in most countries (including whole Europe).
Well, i didn't want to rub it in too much, but yes, of course! I run into that very often.
After so many years on the web, i almost find it strange that the envelope manufacturers of the world still let you write ANYTHING on an envelope. Man, are they behind the times! ;-)
ciao!
Nando
Just wondering which portion/form at adobe.com you had trouble with. Please let me know ?
I DO remember the bug report form ... i think at that time it was still on macromedia.com. I'd been seeing an inconsistency with CFAS picking up changes to code i pre-compiled and uploaded mixed with source code i uploaded to the server and let CFAS compile on first use. It was a little complex to explain, and i very carefully typed into the description field the steps to reproduce, in an as concise and accurate way as i could, read it over several times and corrected, restated things more accurately, clicked Submit, and got back a "Invalid Description" error, explaining to me that a valid bug description was less than 2000 characters long.
Jez that pissed me off. No offence to anyone involved. Really. I know how hard it is to get everything "right" in this business from all the different perspectives you need to look at things. But i was really pissed, nonetheless, and almost gave up. It seemed like an important bug to fix, so in the end, i decided to persist and try again.
I opened Word, so i could track the number of characters, and started again. I can't remember whether the validation script wiped my description or not, but my impression is that it did. It took me a long time to figure out how to say it in less than 2000 characters, but finally i managed it at exactly 1999 characters by leaving out some details which i thought were important and clipping my sentences into phrases, and sure enough, almost as a tribute to the developer who very accurately built that form, my bug report was accepted. ;-)
The bug has not been fixed to my knowledge, and i've always wondered if it was because of how i shortened the description.
I'm not sure if the bug report form on Adobe.com has the same validation approach now as it did then. I do remember i complained somewhere, and got a response from someone at Macromedia that they'd look into it. But i never heard if it had been changed. Maybe the engineers really want that the descriptions are no longer than 2000 characters, and did not accept the suggestion.
I was in what turned out to be a very heated discussion with one of our clients in LA a few weeks ago. I pointed out an overly restrictive validation routine on their site and just said it should be corrected, indicating all the ways it could fail. They didn't want to do it. The director of marketing, no less, insisted that they absolutely needed to have VALID data if their business was going to succeed. He would not be persuaded. And we're talking about a form here where the first and last name HAVE to be less than 15 characters long each, the email address can only be on the domains .com, .net and .org, and HAS to be less than 20 characters, and the phone number ... well, you know. 10 digits, numeric characters only, no spaces either.
Well, I'm way over 2000 characters, so I'd better leave it at this before someone gets annoyed at my loquaciousness! ;-) n.
spero di essere stato chiaro. ti abbraccio
I'm not sure what's good and bad, but i do know that validation needs to much more user centric than it is these days on the web.
I needed to send my birth certificate back the the US to be recertified as valid (talk about validation! i'm not enough proof that i've been born) and used FedEx to do it. Their online form insisted on spell checking our company address, and Centro Nord Sud became Central Nord Sued ... again, without my consent. Nobody seems to know how to collect my valid address anymore on their web forms. The bigger the company, the worse it seems to be.
BTW, nice to see my captcha here.