In Open Event Frontend we have used semantics ui’s form validations to validate different fields of a form. There are certain instances in our app where the user has to upload a file and it is to be validated against the suggested format before uploading it to the server. Here we will discuss how to perform the validation.
Semantics ui allows us to validate by facilitating pass of an object along with rules for its validation. For fields like email and contact number we can pass type as email and number respectively but for validation of file we have to pass a regular expression with allowed extension.The following walks one through the process.
fields : {
file: {
identifier : 'file',
rules : [
{
type : 'empty',
prompt : this.l10n.t('Please upload a file')
},
{
type : 'regExp',
value : '/^(.*.((zip|xml|ical|ics|xcal)$))?[^.]*$/i',
prompt : this.l10n.t('Please upload a file in suggested format')
}
]
}
}
Here we have passed file element (which is to be validated) inside our fields object identifier, which for this field is ‘file’, and can be identified by its id, name or data-validate property of the field element. After that we have passed an array of rules against which the field element is validated. First rule gives an error message in the prompt field in case of an empty field.
The next rule checks for allowed file extensions for the file. The type of the rule will be regExp as we are passing a regular expression which is as follows-
/^(.*.((zip|xml|ical|ics|xcal)$))?[^.]*$/i
It is little complex to explain it from the beginning so let us breakdown it from end-
$ | Matches end of the string |
---|---|
[^.]* | Negated set. Match any character not in this set. * represents 0 or more preceding token |
( … )? | Represents if there is something before (the last ?) |
.*.((zip|xml|ical|ics|xcal)$) | This is first capturing group ,it contains tocken which are combined to create a capture group ( zip|xml|ical|ics|xcal ) to extract a substring |
^ | the beginning of the string |
Above regular expression filters all the files with zip/xml/ical/xcal extensions which are the allowed format for the event source file.