Yerp is an object property validation library for PHP. It was written to provide simply validation for some other libraries, but it may have some value elsewhere.
Yerp uses PHP Attributes to set validation rules on public properties. You can then pass an instance of that object to the validator and get a result. Results are are boolean, so there's no translation or language requirements. You can specify your own messages based on the result.
composer require thepublicgood/yerp
Each validation rule is a different attribute class in the TPG\Yerp\Rules
namespace.
Here's a quick example:
use TPG\Yerp\Rules;
class User
{
#[Rules\Required]
public string $firstName;
#[Rules\Nullable]
public ?string $lastName = null;
#[Rules\Required, Rules\Email]
public string $emailAddress;
#[Rules\Boolean(true)]
public boolean $active;
}
There are a number of built-in rules and you can easily add your own.
Note that only public properties can validated.
To validate an object, pass it to the Validator
class and call the validate
method. This will return an instance of Validated
which provides access to the results of each rule on each property.
class UserController
{
public function create()
{
// Create a new object instance
$user = new User();
$user->firstName = 'John';
$user->lastName = 'Doe';
$user->emailAddress = '[email protected]';
$user->active = false;
// Pass to the validator
$validated = (new Validator($user))->validate();
}
}
The Validated
class provides a property
method which you can use to get to the result of a particular property. The property
method returns an instance of Result
. You can use the provided passed
method to test the result of a given property:
$validated = (new Validator($user))->validate();
$validated->property('firstName')->passed();
The passed
method returns a boolean representing the validation result of that property. There is also a failed
method which returns the exact opposite:
$validated->property('firstName')->failed();
If you want to know the result of a specific rule on the property, you can pass the class name of the rule to the property
method:
$validated->property('firstName', Rule\Required::class)->passed();
All validation rules will be evaluated in the order they appear. You can tell Yerp to stop validating the rest of the rules if a specific one fails. You can do this by passing true
to the last
property on any rule:
#[Rule\Nullable, Rules\Email(last: true), Rule\Equal('[email protected]')]
public string $emailAddress;
In the example above, if the Email
rule fails, then the Equal
rule will not be evaluated. If the Email
rule DOES pass, then the Equal
rule will be evaluated and will be present in the results. If you end the evaluation by using last
, then any rules that come later will not be included in the results set. This is important because if you try to check the outcome of a rule that doesn't exist in the results, you'll get an InvalidRuleException
.
Although Yerp is designed to be translation agnostic, it can be handy to set a static message. You can do so by passing a string value to the failure
property of any rule:
#[Rules\Email(failure: 'Must be a valid email address')]
public string $email;
When this rule evaluates, you'll be able to use the message
method on the Result
class:
$validated->property('email', Rules\Email::class)->message();
If the rule passes, or no message is set, then the message
method will return null
. By default, the message is only returned when the rule fails. However, you can specify a success message if you like by passing a string to the success
. property:
#[Rules\Email(
success: 'The email address is valid!', // Success
failure: 'Must be a valid email address', // Failed
)]
public string $email;
The Required
rule is handy to validate a property that must be present. A "required" property must contain a value, cannot be null and cannot be empty. An empty array, or an empty string would fail:
#[Rules\Required]
property ?string $someString;
The Alpha
rule ensures that the value of the property contains only letters.
#[Rules\Alpha]
property string $someString;
The ArrayKey
rule simply ensures that the specified key exists in the array:
#[Rules\ArrayKey('test')]
property array $someArray;
The Boolean
rule allows you to validate that the property is either TRUE or FALSE:
#[Rules\Boolean(true)]
property bool $mustBeTrue;
You can ensure that a property is equal to a specific value. Simply pass the required value as the first parameter of the Euqal
rule:
#[Rules\Equal('expected')]
propert ?string $someString;
There is also an opposing NotEqual
rule.
A common validation rule is to ensure that a string is a valid email address:
#[Rules\Email]
property string $emailAddress;
The In
rule allows you to test if a value is one of the specified values:
#[Rules\In(['a', 'b', 'c'])]
property string $someString;
The Length
rule allows you to specify a minimum and/or maximum length. If the property type is an array, then length validates the number of array elements:
#[Rules\Length(min: 5, max: 20)]
property string $someString;
You don't need to specify both, but you must specify at least one value.
The Numeric
rule ensures that the property is parsable as a number:
#[Rules\Numeric]
property string $someString;
You can pass a regex string as the first parameter of the Regex
rule:
#[Rules\Regex('/^test$/')]
property string $regexString;
Yerp only provides a small number of rules. This was mainly because they're the only ones we needed at time. We might add new rules as we need them more often, but it's simple to add your own rules without needing to ask.
Create a new class to contain your rule logic extending the TPG\Yerp\Rules\AbstractRule
class and add #[Attribute]
to the class definition.
You'll need to implement the required validate
method which returns a TPG\Yerp\Result
. You can use the getResult
method, which takes a boolean value, to return a new Result
instance:
namespace CustomRules;
use Attribute;
use TPG\Yerp\Rules\AbstractRule;
use TPG\Yerp\Result;
#[Attribute]
class HyphenatedRule extends AbstractRule
{
public function validate(mixed $value): Result
{
return $this->getResult(str_contains((string)$value, '-'));
}
}
Now you can use your new rule in any class:
use CustomRules\Hyphenated;
class Article
{
public string $title;
#[HyphenatedRule]
public string $slug;
}
Your new rule gets the same last
, success
and failure
parameters. If your rule needs to accept a value, simply specify it in a constructor:
namespace CustomRules;
use Attribute;
use TPG\Yerp\Rules\AbstractRule;
use TPG\Yerp\Result;
use DelimitedRule extends AbstractRule
{
public function __construct(protected string $delimiter = ',')
{
}
public function validate(string $value): Result
{
return $this->getResult(str_contains($value, $this->delimited));
}
}
The MIT License (MIT). See the LICENSE.md file for more information.