Ward

Ward is not ready for production use just yet. 0.1 should be considered a preview release only.

Object validation inspired by RSpec. As it turns out, Ward looks very little like RSpec, but that's where the inspiration came from nonetheless.

The aim is to provide an expressive DSL which allows you to compose validations without the need to create special validation methods.

class Person
  include Ward::Validation

  validate do |person|
    person.subdomain.length.is(2..50)
    person.has.at_least(5).posts
    person.owner.name.is("Michael Scarn")
  end
end

Note: The syntax described above isn't currently supported, though you can achieve a very similar end result with 0.1:

class Person
  cattr_accessor :validators

  # ...
end

Person.validators = Ward::ValidatorSet.build do |person|
  person.subdomain.length.is(2..50)
  person.has.at_least(5).posts
  person.owner.name.is("Michael Scarn")
end

Person.validators.valid?(Person.new)
# => false

Person.validators.validate(Person.new)
# => Ward::Support::Result

Planned for 0.2:

• Add the Ward::Validation module allowing for more conventional validation (defining the validations on the object to be validated, as is the case with ActiveRecord and dm-validations).

• Documentation is severely lacking, and will be improved. In the meantime, Ward makes extensive use of Cucumber features (/features) where you will find many examples of how to use the library in your own applications.

• Ward error messages are currently in English only, but full i18n support is planned.

Planned for 0.3:

• Compatibility modules will be added to support at least ActiveRecord and DataMapper; and perhaps Sequel and other ORMs after that, depending on demand.

Later:

• The DSL is subject to change prior to 1.0.

Ward specs are run against:

• Ruby (MRI) 1.8.7 p249,
• Ruby (YARV) 1.9.1 p378,
• JRuby 1.4.0,
• Rubinius RC3.

Ward depends on ActiveSupport 3.0 to provide support for inflections in error messages, and to add Ruby 1.9-style String interpolation. However, only the bare minimum is included from ActiveSupport in order to minimise the impact on your runtime environment (see lib/ward.rb for specifics).

• Fork the project, taking care not to get any in your eyes.

• Make your feature addition or bug fix.

• Add tests for it. This is especially important not only because it helps ensure that I don't unintentionally break it in a future version, but also since it appeases Phyllis --- the goddess of Cucumbers --- who has been known to rain showers of fresh vegetables on those who don't write tests.

• Commit, but do not mess with the Rakefile, VERSION, or history. If you want to have your own version, that is fine, but bump version in a commit by itself so that I can ignore it when I pull.

• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches. But we all know everything is made up and the points don't matter.

Copyright (c) 2010 Anthony Williams, MIT Licensed.