anewt-developers team mailing list archive

[Sander van Schouwenburg <sander@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anewt developers,

There are quite some instances in anewt where you would want to display 
an error message, particularly in form controls during validation. The 
current solution is to use either a hard coded error string, or no 
message at all. Both are not really desirable.

Maybe we could do something with internationalization? I see there is a 
very basic i18n module, but I have no practical knowledge of how to use 
i18n/gettext.

I suggest something like the following:

class SomethingWhichValidates {
	function __construct() {
		$this->seed(array(
			...,
			'error_message' => _('My error'),
		));
	}
	...
	function is_valid() {
		...
		if (!$valid) {
			$this->error = $this->error_message;
		}
		return $valid;
	}
}

That way you can have a default internationalized error message, and 
it's also user overridable.

I'm not saying we should use this for our current validators, just for 
some form controls which also have some internal validation (like 
AnewtFormControlText to check if there is a newline in there somewhere).

The basic problem is how to store/retrieve all the text strings. I have 
no knowledge of i18n/gettext, so I don't know how that works.
Also, "_('My error')" could also be something like 
"ANEWT_TEXT_SOMETHING_ERROR_MESSAGE" or "_('ERROR_MESSAGE')" or 
something, I don't know.

Bonus points if the error strings are user configurable (e.g., supply a 
filename with the translations). Even more bonus points if he only has 
to supply the overridden strings.

-- Sander