[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Hi Folks,
An excellent, important discussion! Below I have summarized what I perceive
as the key issues. Comments are very welcome.
Here are the two problems that we have been considering:
Problem #1
A company has employees. The current company policy is that the minimum age
of employees is 16. What happens when a 15 year old whiz kid is hired?
Validation by the IT department of the data file for this new employee will
result in sending up error flags. Should the IT department run the
business, or should the business run the IT department?
Problem #2
A person from the UK makes an online purchase from a US supplier. The online
supplier requires entry of a two-letter code in the "State" box and a
numeric value in the "postal code" box, despite the fact that the person
entered UK as the country. So, the person entered "ZZ" as the state and
12345 as the postal code. Does validation result in forcing people to
supply incorrect information?
In discussing these problems, two categories of validation were identified:
1. "Syntactical" or "structural" validation
2. "Semantic" or "business rule" validation
"Syntactical" or "structural" validation is useful in eliminating a certain
number of mechanical data entry errors, such as leaving out required items
or putting strings in fields that require numbers (e.g. phone numbers,
dates, etc.)
"Semantic" or "business rule" validation captures some aspect of a business'
requirements. An example is validating that a credit card is acceptable.
There are two categories of tools for doing validation:
1. Declarative-based tools
2. Procedural-based tools
The declarative-based tools include XML Schemas, XForms, CAM. The advantage
of these tools is that the constraints they express are easily changed. The
disadvantage is limited expressiveness (consequently, it may be very
difficult to express semantic/business rule constraints using these tools).
The declarative-based tools are typically client-side tools.
The procedural-based tools include Javascript, Java, C#, etc. The advantage
of these tools is that they have rich expressiveness. The disadvantage is
that changes are not as easily made. The procedural-based tools are
typically back-end tools.
The declarative-based tools are better suited for "Syntactical" or
"structural" validation.
The procedural-based tools are better suited for "Semantic" or "business
rule" validation.
Other Issues
In a highly distributed system there is no definable "back-end" where all
business rules may be validated. In such a case, it may be beneficial to
push semantic/business rule validation out to the client-side.
XML Schemas, XForms, CAM, Javascript - these are all a "means to an end".
If you are going to validate, then validate! In Problem #2 the user was
forced to enter a 2-character state code, despite being from the UK.
Several people noted that the problem was not with too much validation, but
with not enough validation. If the system had been doing a good job
validating then "ZZ" would not have been allowed for the state code.
Further, full validation would have determined that if the country code is
UK then no value is required for the state code.
/Roger
|
