CRM-18981 Add a 'validate' action to CiviCRM API

[saurabhbatra96]

• CRM-18981: Add a 'validate' action to CiviCRM API

[saurabhbatra96]

@eileenmcnaughton what do you imagine a test on this would look like?
PS: Also, does this approach look OK?

[eileenmcnaughton]

I think what we want is to test that we get multiple failure information so something like

function testValidateContribution() {
  $validation = $this->callApiSuccess('Contribution', 'validate', array('action' => 'create', 'params' => array('financial_type_id' => 'Monopoly Money'));

$this->assertEquals(array('financial_type_id' => 'Invalid Option', 'contact_id' => 'Missing Required', $validation['values']);
}

It would be possible to do a syntax conformance test - but it may add little value over a couple of single entity tests.

[eileenmcnaughton]

is there a reason not to use civicrm_api3 here?

[saurabhbatra96]

@eileenmcnaughton Going to add a test, but did some basic testing from the API explorer and this looks good!

[eileenmcnaughton]

tests are showing a typo
===============================[ php -l ]===============================
PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_BOOLEAN_AND, expecting ')' in api/v3/utils.php on line 1555
Errors parsing api/v3/utils.php
===============================[ phpcs ]===============================
Found PHP errors

[eileenmcnaughton]

Super trivial - but the full whitespace standard would have a blank line here

[eileenmcnaughton]

This looks good. I still have an urge to have validate throw an exception (from which the errors can be extracted) rather than return success when it finds errors - but maybe I'm overly attached to exceptions @totten should probably talk me down from that.

The second thing is that ideally one the validate api is all good we would alter the main api wrapper to call the validate api rather than having 2 paths & having the wrapper not have the benefit of a consolidated error. NB this does not have to be done as part of this PR - it's just where it would be good to take this

[saurabhbatra96]

Are the tests not written correctly? Can't seem to run them without running into "error in api call" while the API works just fine in the API explorer.

Also, reminder to self: complete the comments before merging.

[eileenmcnaughton]

These are coming out of the syntaxconformance tests - notably the getfields-title test goes through every entity-action combo to make sure the declared fields have titles

[eileenmcnaughton]

Add $params['action']['title'] = ts('blah blah');

for a huge test improvement

[saurabhbatra96]

$validation['values'][0] - this nesting seems like a necessary evil. Cannot return the output in this dictionary format without using it:

    {
    "is_error": 0,
    "version": 3,
    "count": 1,
    "id": 0,
    "values": [
        {
            "contact_type": {
                "message": "Mandatory key(s) missing from params array: contact_type",
                "code": "mandatory_missing"
            }
        }
    ]
}

[eileenmcnaughton]

hmm - should it be up one?

ie

$result['values']['contact_type'] => you would need to add field_name to the response array for when it's called with 'is_sequential'

[saurabhbatra96]

Up for a chat on mattermost?

[saurabhbatra96]

This is just how civicrm_api3_create_success arranges the API output.
I could instead go for:

{
    "is_error": 0,
    "version": 3,
    "count": 1,
    "id": 0,
    "values": [
           {
                "name": "total_amount",
                "message": "Mandatory key(s) missing from params array: total_amount",
                "code": "mandatory_missing"
            },
            {
                "name": "contact_id",
                "message": "Mandatory key(s) missing from params array: contact_id",
                "code": "mandatory_missing"
            }
    ]
}

[saurabhbatra96]

Looks good to merge IMO.