Validation on vardefs

While working with SugarCRM, I noticed that a lot of developers tend to do validations using JS and Logic Hooks while they could just use a more cool feature that exists probably since 5.x.

It just needs a few tweaks on vardefs.php file. Imagine that you have a integer field defined in vardefs and you want to make sure that the user only inputs data within the 110 and 65535 range. You could just add this to the vardef:

$dictionary['<Module>']['fields']['my_field'] = array(
    // name and other properties for this field
    'type' => 'int',
    'validation' => array(
        'type' => 'range',
        'min' => '110',
        'max' => '65535',
    ),
    // rest of the vardef info
);

This can also be done to change current vardef fields that already exist on a certain module.

$dictionary['<ExistingModule>']['fields']['existing_field']['validation'] = array(
    'type' => 'range',
    'min' => '110',
    'max' => '65535',
);

So, what other validations we can use? There is the range (normally applied to numbers) and the isbefore (normally applied to dates). Then you can have a callback which allows you to define a function to validate, but I usually use it for both custom validation and JS listener to update another field or make a custom request to the server.

The isbefore validation normally needs another field to compare to:

$dictionary['<Module>']['fields']['my_field'] = array(
    // name and other properties for this field
    'type' => 'date', // or datetimecombo
    'validation' => array (
        'type' => 'isbefore',
        'compareto' => 'end_date',
        'blank' => true, // this will allow blanks or not
    ),
    // rest of the vardef info
);

Let me know if you find more of this stuff useful and I'll start posting more of it!