I am unable to get my input validations on my web form to work. Does anyone know if Input Validation, @Success and @Failure works on the web? Also, is there a command or a way that will allow a messagebox to appear on the web form, similar to the ‘alert’ function in javascript?
Subject: Input Validation and web forms
Yes, input validation does work on the web. However, this requires a round trip to the server. It is usually more desirable to perform the validation with javascript since that will operate client side. You can also do things like set the users focus to the offending field, highlight it, alert messages, etc. It gives your users a better experience.
Subject: RE: Input Validation and web forms
Doing both would be preferable – a belt-and-suspenders approach, if you will. The big advantage to JavaScript validation is, as you mentioned, that the validation occurs nearly instantaneously in the browser. The user doesn’t have to wait, and the server doesn’t have to process the request. However, this does nothing to prevent bad data from getting to the server – the user can have JavaScript disabled, have a problem loading one or more JavaScript files, or may have malicious intent (creating a local form and submitting it to your server is easy, given the stateless nature of the web and the ease of creating and editing HTML).
At the same time, there may be data that you never want to supply to a user for validation. Formula validation (or WQS agents, or both) can deal with these problems. JS “validation” in the browser for convenience and server load plus server-side (real) validation is the way to go.