defenders.js

Defending inputs across the land.


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Free field

Restricted field

Separated field

Introduction to the defenders

The defender library is made of a series of modules:

This simple premise of each of this is to make working with validation for inputs a lot easier. The comprised parts a modular in nature so can be composed (or not depending on the case at hand) to enable the easy chaining of state through out validation.

Soothsayer

The Soothsayer is interlinked to the Fortune teller, but the basic idea is that you create a Soothsayer and give it a pattern that can be parsed and replaced by other things (RegExp, DOM elements).

The Soothsayer is not restricted by the bounds of the validator, just what you pass in for the look up of the pattern. If nothing is found an error is thrown.

To help with this we have Runes, which make it easier to work with Regular Expressions.


Example

The following example creates a Soothsayer and generates a possible future of regular expressions.

var pattern = IO(function() {
  return '##-##-##';
});
var sayer = soothsayer({
    '#': /^[0-9]/,
    '-': /^-/
})(pattern);

Guardian

The Guardians job in the flow is to remove any items from the input that you don't want to be validated by the Defender. In turn guarding the Defender.

It's a simple premise of using a regular expression to attempt to normalise the user input as much as possible, such as trimming the white space front and back or removing comments.


Example

The following example creates a Guardian which will guard against white space.

var guard = guardian(/^\s/);

Defender

The Defenders job is go through the Soothsayers runes and check the input against those runes. The result is either a failure or a success.

If the result is a failure a stack trace of where the input failed is passed back along with the position. This should make it easier to see what failed and where.


Example

The following example creates a Defender that when called uses the Guardian to guard the input.

var defend = defender(sayer);
defend(guard(io));

Fortune Teller

The Fortune Teller job is to decipher what the input field could possibly look like on key down, before the text has been entered. From there it should be possible to pipe this into the Defenders to then work out if a input is permitted.

The role of a Fortune Teller is highly specialized and because of this a lot more information is required to do the job at hand.


Example

The following uses a value of the current input field, it then grabs what the event is along with any key information (unicode characters etc...) and then finally the selection upon where the new character needs to be added, removed etc.

fortune(value)(fromEvent(e), selection);

Steward

A Steward attends over the processing of a value, by looking in to the value, attending to it's various needs before putting the value back into it's original type.

The role of the Steward is to preside over internal modifications of a value.